knowledge management and list archives

[John King <john.king@st-johns.oxford.ac.uk>]

> 	i've been quite and reading with interest the idea of building an
> index. i also have a proposition for the members of the list. the amount
> of information wich has passed through the list is, i think you will
> agree, huge by this time. what i wanted to propose to you is the building
> up of a web space carrying all that information. it would be, in a smaller
> scale, a personal luminar (is this the right word? i meant that huge
> information resource wich Venator has acess in the casbah) containing all
> the subjects, views, discussions and facts wich have been placed in the
> list. i had this idea because after downloading the archive file from
> majordomo i realized it would be a real headache to get what i really
> wanted to read and to follow the right threads... the project would be
> enrichead by photos and such.

This is a very interesting idea and hits straight at the problem of
knowledge management and the extent to which we can use IT in the
humanities to support our work and research when we are confronted by ever
increasing quantities of information to process and use appropriately. The
IT revolution combined with the attitude of research funding bodies
applying efficiency and value for money criteria derived from industry has
meant an explosion in publications and access to publications. 

Drawing all this together into a document management system combined with
advanced full text search database engines might be one way forward,
sharing knowledge amongst research groups via the net, finally breaking
with the old hermeneutic paradigm of humanities research as progress in
individual interpretation.

Back to the mail archive. I am currently working on transforming the
Majordomo archive files into HTML by processing them with perl and piping
them into the hypermail program to produce archives sorted by author,
thread, date and subject. They will also be searchable using the free
engine WebGlimpse. I further intend to set the system up such that new
mails to the list will automatically be added to the system, and that the
"current" archive will be archived on a monthly basis. That means learning
more about unix cron jobs, but it should be do-able. I'll post the URLs
publically here, once I'm done.

JK, wannabe linux guru ;-)

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John King
St. John's College	
GB - Oxford OX1 3JP
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