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Re: "Reasonable" E-Mail Contact?



While I'm sorry Christine's buttons are being pushed, I think she's in about the same position as an engineer in the 1980's would have been, if he refused to give up his slide-rule.  The time has come to give up the quill pen.

Most professional journals and many academic journals already list the email addresses of writers and correspondents.  This is a tendency that will only increase as postage rates increase.  Back in the nineteenth century it was not uncommon for individuals to correspond with each other on a daily basis.  Indeed, even in the 1960's, I could reasonably expect to pass two or three letters from school to my hometown in a week.  That is hardly the case, now.  In an odd sense, using email returns me to those genteel days of daily note correspondence.

There is also the simple fact that as the regular posts have become slower and far more unreliable, some sort of electronic communication was bound to become pervasive, and the only other alternative would seem to be the telephone.  I for one, loathe speaking on the phone, where there is neither the nuance of face-to-face conversation nor the relaxed response time of literary composition.  Thus, for those of us who hate talking on the telephone, email has, in fact, become a godsend.

In case we all hadn't noticed, telephone requests for information and services have greatly increased over the past decade or so.  Referring people to email gives them the opportunity to get a reasonably fast response while saving you the hassle of trying to decode what some disembodied voice coming over a wire is getting at.

As for lifestyle changes--well, I can't see why looking at one's email once every day or so really is more strain than looking into the mailbox on the front stoop.

I expect the real reason for most objections to email is technophobia.  We archivists are a fustian lot, for the most part.  But we need to confront this fear pretty soon.  The number of archivists who still haven't come up with plans on how to handle their own organization's electronic correspondence is astonishing.  And even those who can rely on some computer geek to "archive" the material for them still have to address the problem of how to access thos records in a meaningful way.

There has been far too little discussion of that problem on this list.

John Howard Fowler

---------- christine harper <harperc@SLU.EDU> writes:

From: christine harper <harperc@SLU.EDU>
To: ARCHIVES@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU
Subject: "Reasonable" E-Mail Contact?
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 15:02:45 -0500

Dear Folks,

Steve Masar asked whether it's "reasonable" to expect researchers to
provide e-mail addresses along with/instead of U. S. postal mail
addresses. (I refuse to use the derogatory term "snail mail.")

Sorry, but the current insistence on e-mail addresses pushes all the
wrong buttons with me.  As an archivist, I don't care how people prefer
to be contacted, although I don't like playing phone tag any more than
Steve does, especially the long-distance kind.  Besides, I often end up
using an e-mail address only to request a postal mail address in order
to send the patron Xerox copies of the material requested. (No, we can't
scan the info or provide it all over the internet).

As a researcher, I simply am not interested in having a computer/Web
access/e-mail/etc. in my home.  The reasons are many: money, lifestyle
choice, comfort (or lack thereof) with technology.  I have lost contact
with my remaining high school friends because I cannot provide them with
a private e-mail address to which they can direct their e-letters!  So
be it.  But e-mail is only one of the legitimate choices of
communication open to us at this moment in time.  For many people, it is
still not a viable/desirable choice and may never be.  Who are the
"e-mail police" to demand otherwise?

Unfortunately, I see our society trending more and more away from choice
and toward mandatory use of e-mail.  I hope that we archivists,
committed as we are to equal access to information, won't lend ourselves
to this troubling abridgment of civic and personal freedom.

Now if we could just get more researchers to use those nifty SASEs . . .

Chris Harper
Archives Assistant, Saint Louis University
harperc@slu.edu

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