The use and usefulness of listservs verses some other tool came up many times in discussions about contracting for a new webhosting service for a professional organization in which I am a member. The committees and the executive board do almost all of their communication via email listserv technology, and almost everyone agreed that they would rather have something that pushed messages out to interested parties than having to pull them from somewhere like a forum, wiki, or other two-point-oh tech.

So, given all that, I’d say that the email discussion list is a dinosaur for broad groups of people connected only by the list, but for focused groups, it’s still a viable tool.

I understand the desire for a sort of “one stop shopping,” which is what I think a lot of listserv lovers are looking for. Go to your email account, get everything you need right there. But for me, I like to keep correspondence separate from open discussion. But, like I said, maybe it’s just because of how my mind works and how I like to organize my life and workflow, and the kind of priority level I have to assign the different messages I get every day. .

That said, like others who have replied here, I subscribe to the ListServs I need to. But I rarely (if ever) add my voice to the discussion.

The thing that is too bad about the whole discussion is that I’d hate to see the discussions that go on in our profession get splintered and one-sided because one group of would-be participants is in Listserv land and the rest are all over the place using other tools. It doesn’t bode well for getting a balanced view of all sides of our professional issues into the discussions.

Email lists subscribed to: 7 (“own” 2 library ones, subscribe to 3 other library ones, 1 church, 1 dog-breed)

Ning account/forum: 1 (which I quit reading as I never quite understood the format)

Facebook: 1 account, 1 library group, a lot of fun

Blog: see link above

All serve different purposes, I think. I would really like to move the two lists I “own” to Facebook, but the list subscribers (about 150–these are lists of small interest) don’t yet equal the Facebook folks (48 total).

I’ve seen two types of listservs: administrative, almost exclusively announcements with rather low conversation among the members; and social, with lots of conversation, inside jokes, and personalities come through. On the social front, I think a fair amount of social apps facilitate activity better than on listservs and provide a richer experience for those involved. But in my setting, us students have time bounds to our membership that seem not to agree with how most social software networks are set up.

My biggest personal gripe with listservs is that members have to consciously edit their replies so that long trains of quoted text don’t follow their posts. I suppose this contributes to listservs looking clunky.

In looking over comments here, the question almost reminds me of battles over instant messaging clients, where you want all your friends to roll over to your client of choice. Seems like attempts to port a listserv over to some social app would find similar difficulties.