9.240 Humanist subscriptions & the database

Humanist (mccarty@phoenix.Princeton.EDU)
Wed, 18 Oct 1995 21:33:52 -0400 (EDT)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 9, No. 240.
Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (Princeton/Rutgers)
http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/

[1] From: David Hoekema <dhoekema@calvin.edu> (12)
Subject: Subscription status

[See response below.]

I am receiving HUMANIST postings, but I do not find my name listed when I
look up subscribers. In fact, there seem to be only a few dozen
subscribers listed on the database! Should I "subscribe" again from the
Web page, and submit the biography (subject of recent discussion on the
list) when requested? Or will that cause a duplication subscription?
Advice appreciated. Many thanks for reviving/maintaining the list.
--David Hoekema
(Academic Dean, Calvin College)
(Princeton Philosophy Ph.D.--who toiled in the early 70's in the
underground bunker of the computer center, off Prospect Ave., creating
huge stacks of IBM punchcards which contained, in NROFF format, my
seminar papers! I lived in dread of doorsills that would cause me to
lose a semester's work by scrambling the order of my punchcards.)

[My thanks to David Hoekema for pointing out that the new database of
members is hardly complete. Here is the situation, which we were meaning
to discuss here but hadn't yet done so.

The old list of members and the collected biographies (which is what we call
the entries in the database) were moved from Brown when Humanist moved to
Princeton a while ago. Then Greg Murphy (CETH) wrote the subscription
pages in order to automate as much of the submission and processing of
these biographies as possible. In the old days, when we all had much more
time, and money, I did all of the processing by hand, that is before some
cleverer people than I helped by writing software to convert these bios
into SGML. In any case, we would now be in the process of shifting the
information over into the new database, but since this information is so
out of date for so many members, we have planned to ask everyone to
resubmit bios using the new Web form. This request will go out on
Humanist soon, but don't say you haven't been warned.

Thanks to everyone for your patience.

WM]