harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad) (08/07/88)
This is a copy of letter to Bob Morecock, Editor of Psychnet: Bob, Here is a thought I had: You could perform a double service, to Psychnet as well as the psychological community if you systematically put together a psychologists' email address directory. I heard (perhaps from you) that APA will be publishing members' email addresses, but that's in hard copy and a while away. If you could get the addresses in an electronic file/listserver it would be a great service to the field AND would give Psychnet an automatic broad subscribership. I don't know what official policy and rules are on this. I suspect that they're only now being improvised on the fly. But it seems to me that a newsletter and email directory are sufficiently non-invasive so you can probably treat email address information as public-domain -- like (listed) phone numbers. People who want to be "unlisted" could easily put up software that returned unwanted messages unread, and they could even distribute passwords to the only ones they want to hear from; but most psychologists, I suspect, would like to see email used more widely and imaginatively, at least for the time being. Once we reach the junk mail threshold we can start putting in safeguards. A method for compiling such a directory might be this: Besides requesting APA's cooperation (i.e., asking them to give you all the email lists they've gotten as they go along) you could send email queries to all the major universities and research institutions, either requesting their directories of psychologists email addresses, if possible, or else requesting that your appeal for psychologists' email addresses be posted on the local electronic bboards and msgs to ask psychologists to send in their email addresses for the directory and newsletter directly to you. In exchange you could promise to provide email addresses to those who inquire -- this would not have to be done by you personally, but by software, if the directory were set up properly. This is EXACTLY the right time to set up such a psycholgists' email directory; it will get already-emailing psychologists more actively involved and it will encourage others to get email addresses. You might even be able to get a grant to help you do this from APA, NSF or NIMH. What do you think? [You may want to post this on Psychnet to get readers' reactions, but really the Psychnet readership is still far too small and unrepresentative, so in talking to ourselves now we are just preaching to the converted. This also needs to be posted to a much larger population. I'm going to put it on some of the USENET groups to see whether there is other information on compiling such a directory, perhaps from experience in other fields, and also to beat the bushes to see whether this has already been begun or done by anyone else for psychology or related fields.] Stevan -- Stevan Harnad ARPANET: harnad@mind.princeton.edu harnad@princeton.edu harnad@confidence.princeton.edu srh@flash.bellcore.com harnad@mind.uucp BITNET: harnad%mind.princeton.edu@pucc.bitnet UUCP: princeton!mind!harnad CSNET: harnad%mind.princeton.edu@relay.cs.net
dmark@cs.Buffalo.EDU (David Mark) (08/07/88)
In article <2721@mind.UUCP> harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad) writes: > >This is a copy of letter to Bob Morecock, Editor of Psychnet: > >Bob, > >Here is a thought I had: You could perform a double service, to Psychnet >as well as the psychological community if you systematically put together >a psychologists' email address directory. I heard (perhaps from you) that >APA will be publishing members' email addresses, but that's in hard copy and >a while away. If you could get the addresses in an electronic file/listserver >it would be a great service to the field AND would give Psychnet an automatic >broad subscribership. I have had good success in compiling such a directory for geographers and other spatial scientists. Three of us began the project by merging our own lists about 3 years ago. Then, we ran a workshop on e-mail at the Association of American Geographers' national meeting in May 1986. Periodically, I send the file to all in the file, asking them to confirm their entries and suggest colleagues to add. It just grows and grows. I did a mass e-mailing in June to about 240 users, and got about 60-70 new ones back. I even have a few spatial psychologists! We have suggested that a field for email address be added to the AAG's membership form. David Mark, Chair, AAG Gegraphic Information Systems Specialty Group geodmm@ubvmsc.cc.buffalo.edu geodmm@ubvms.BITNET