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Changes to MnPALS Mailing Lists

February 2008

Last Fall (November 2007) the MnPALS User Council and the MnPALS Executive Committee recommended re-organization of the MnPALS mailing lists. We are in the process of completing the necessary work and we wanted to explain to you what will be happening regarding the mailing lists.

Currently, we host about a dozen mailing lists:
  • Aleph-migration - Aleph migration discussion list
  • Libproxy - Libproxy rewriting proxy server
  • Mnpals-aleph-ill - MnPALS ALEPH ILL
  • MnSCU-PALS - Discussion list for topics of general interest
  • PALS-ACQ - MnSCU/PALS Acquisitions list
  • PALS-CAT - MnSCU/PALS Cataloging list
  • PALS-CIRC - MnSCU/PALS Circulation list
  • PALS-ILL - MnSCU/PALS Inter-Library Loan list
  • PALS-REF - MnSCU/PALS Reference list
  • PALS-SER - MnSCU/PALS Serials list
  • PALS-SYS - MnSCU/PALS Systems Librarians list
These lists will no longer be used after the re-organization.

CREATING NEW LISTS

First, we are going to create two new lists:
  • MnPALS-Discuss
  • MnPALS-Announce
The MnPALS-Discuss list will be the list for general discussion.

The MnPALS-Announce list will be the list used to send out announcements. This list will primarily be used for maintenance and system alerts. it will be set up so that only PALS Staff can send unmoderated posts to this list.

SIGNING UP FOR THE LISTS

Rather than migrating all of the accounts from the old lists to the new lists we have opted to "Invite" all of the subscribers from the old lists to each of the new lists.

The invitation will be in the form of an email. The subject of the email will be something like:

confirm 1a47a0d896a7276dbb2a97d456501496afd19f

and the sender of the email will be either:

MnPALS-Discuss-request@lists.mnpals.org
or
MnPALS-Announce-request@lists.mnpals.org

You can either reply to the message to join the list or ignore it to not join the list. You will be sent a separate email for each list; it is up to you whether or not to join a list.

IMPORTANT: You may receive more than one invitation to each list. This will happen if you are signed up on the old lists using multiple accounts. Pay close attention to the email address listed in the email and ONLY reply to the one that is your preferred address. We are not "de-duping" the list of addresses because we don't know which address you prefer and it is easier for you to choose between two addresses than it is for us to weed through 600+ addresses to figure out which ones belong to the same subscribers.

SUBSYSTEM LISTS

The Subsystem lists (including the LibProxy list) will be replaced by Boards on the MnPALS forum. However, if you want to send a message to the MnPALS-Discuss list and it pertains to a specific subsystem, the User Council recommends that you add the appropriate abbreviation (ex: SYS for systems, CAT for cataloging) to the beginning of the subject line to denote which area the message pertains to.


TIME FRAME

We are planning on sending out the invitations for the new lists at the beginning of next week. Soon thereafter the old lists will be shut down. However, we will set it up so that messages sent to any of the old lists will be forwarded to the MnPALS-Discuss list during the transition period.

ARCHIVES

Archived messages from the old lists will be available. The exact format of the archives is yet to be determined but none of that information will be lost.


PLEASE let us know (via the PALS Support Center) if you do not understand the process or if you have any questions or concerns.
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