o Some material on the Internet will arouse complaints from the public because it represents the views of unpopular minorities (e.g liberals, homosexuals, feminists, and intellectuals). There is also a great deal of pornographic material (text and graphics) available by E- mail or through the Usenet newsgroups. Issues of censorship, public funding, and access for minors have yet to be played out in the domain of electronic communications.
In addition to the standard package of services from your provider, librarians should not neglect Usenet Newgroups, even if this means getting a special account with a different service (and accessing it by dial-up or telnet through your primary service). Learning to use the Usenet Newgroups and their invaluable FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) is the *single most important skill for professional development of your staff.* This means that you may want to encourage after-hours "playing" with your computer system. Think of the Usenet Newsgroups as the Reference Section of the Internet.
<Chapter 16> Special for Scholars
It used to be that only scientists and technologists used the academic networks. But no longer. Today there are many humanists and social scientists happily gabbing away with their friends (oops . . . I mean colleagues) at other universities, collaborating by E-mail, subscribing to and writing for E-journals, and so on. This is, of course, in addition to the academic computing environment described in the Chapter for students.
Your main entree to this world is some sort of E-mail access and finding a mailing list or newsgroup for your field. From there you will pick up tips on interesting materials or groups to join—in short you can start networking. The two main sources for such mailing lists are LISTSERVERS (traditional on BITNET) and increasingly Usenet Newsgroups. Actually the newsgroups are not as useful as the lists at the moment *for the humanities*. This is because the academic hierarchy is not as subdivided as the computer science hierarchy. Thus, there is a whole hierarchy for computer science, but all of linguistics fits into sci.lang! These discussion groups either tend to have just a few participants or to be so all-encompassing that they are useless. This does not mean you should ignore Usenet—the computer and networking information is invaluable—just that you will not find it *directly* relevant to your field.
Listservers are another matter. They allow distribution of articles by anyone to the whole list (unless the list is moderated, i.e. refereed by the list's owner), and they allow archiving of articles at a place anyone on the list can access. In short, they form a sort of Electronic Journal with a *very* big reader mail column. To find a list in your field, send the message "INDEX GLOBAL" to any listserver. These usually have an address like "listserv@hoople.usnd.edu". Then send a message like "SUBSCRIBE PDQFAN" to the listserver to join the list PDQFAN. After that you will send messages for publication to "pdqfan@hoople.usnd.edu" and (human) service requests to "pdqfan- request@hoople.usnd.edu".
The best way to use a listserver is to avail yourself of the "SET PDQFAN DIGEST" or "SET <whateverlist> DIGEST" command so that you get the (daily?) mailing as a newspaper and not as a series of fifty or so mail messages interspersed throughout the day. The digest includes *your own* correspondence so that you have a record of this. This is not what happens without the DIGEST option. For full instructions send the message "HELP" to "listserv@whereever.edu".
Ultimately the Humanities will have the same infrastructure of services that already is forming in the Sciences:
o easy access to preprints and collections of journal articles
o archives of data sets, special purpose free software, and text
databases.