The Arts and Humanities Data Service and its JISCmail lists

The Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) is a UK national service funded by the JISC and AHRC to collect, preserve and promote the electronic resources that result from research and teaching in the arts and humanities. It offers advice on creating digital resources for teaching
and research
<http://ahds.ac.uk/creating>,
allows creators to safely deposit their digital creations
<http://ahds.ac.uk/depositing>,
and then allows free public access to the thousands of images, texts, datasets and other scholarly resources made available online.
<http://ahds.ac.uk/collections>

The AHDS runs seven mailing lists via the JISCmail service. Four of these are subject areas the AHDS operates in, for example, ahds-history, then there is a generic announcement list ahds-all a discussion list for any digitisation project ahds-discuss and a staff list

A JISCmail announcement list such as ahds-all can be an enormously effective communication tool because it gives a simple but progressive means of drawing our user communities’ attention to the very stuff the AHDS wants to advertise - its new online collections, advice papers or information about funding. The email is important because, if written correctly, the user can get to this stuff in just two clicks, one to open the email and one to take them to the URL advertised in the email. Compare this to other forms of publicity (printed flyers, newsletters or pamphlets) where the flyer has to be carried back to the office, the computer switched on, and then URL has to be typed in full - a longer process which occurs in the hyperactive, time-challenged, world of cyberspace

where the user’s attention can be distracted in the meantime. For this reason, the mailing list and its recipients are treated like gold dust. Losing subscribers means losing an effective means of communications. Potential members are given every opportunity to join - when applying for workshops, sending emails via the AHDS website etc. The number of messages sent to the list is carefully patrolled to avoid alienating members and risk losing them.

Content of emails is important too. Unless an email's content is of crucial information (e.g. information about funding streams) recipients are unlikely to read the whole thing. Therefore short, effective prose with relevant URLs for recipients is crucial for getting an email’s message across.

Carefully shepherding requests from others (conference announcements, job vacancies) is also important. Rather than simply allowing such messages to be accepted or rejected, editing them down and provide short snippets of news information collected in one email is an efficient way of filtering and disseminating the mass of possible news items.

So far, such a strategy has been successful. The mailing list has grown from about 600 to over 900 users since 2002 and resources advertised by email tend to show an increase in use (albeit in the short term only)

List users also need to consider the timing for delivering general emails. Possibly as recipients are lazing in front of their computers after a filling lunch, the AHDS website gets the most amount of hits between 2 and 3pm, and this is therefore considered the optimum time for sending emails. Never send an important email for UK recipients during the night - there's a much higher chance of it being deleted amongst the spam next morning, and recipients may also have more urgent emails to deal with first thing in the