Date:         Sun, 2 Sep 2001 09:34:06 EDT
Reply-To:     JKrevnov@AOL.COM
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Rico Sapolich <JKrevnov@AOL.COM>
Subject:      Re: Archives? What Archives? What Bullshit.
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Archives?  There are no archives.  To refer to the mass of babel, be it
worthy or inane, generated by this list as an archive is a perversion of the
term on the highest order.  A sad fact of life is there can be no archive
without an archivist to filter the information and bring some order to it.

Directing someone to the archives is often an act of smugness which has
little efficacy for the person seeking an answer to their newest Vanagon
calamity.  Searching any term in the archives, which is to any measure
relevant to Vanagons, will return a glut, numbering in the thousands, of
mostly useless messages.  And, then, since only the first 100 of this vast
number of messages are returned, the exercise becomes even more tedious.

I once heard of a writer whose field of expertise was composing indices of
reference books.  Until that point, I had given little thought to such
things, but once being aware that indices do not appear spontaneously and
people of some intelligence are paid to compose them, I viewed them more
critically.  I now realize that a proper index is vital to a reference book
of any merit.  All one has to do is to haul out the Bentley manual to
appreciate the value of a good index.  I think an archivist should be hired
to bring some order to this morass of bits and bytes.  And, that of course, I
hate to say these words, means there will have to be a fee charged to use the
archives.

Rich