Dear All,

I am sending this out as list owner.  Over the last year, I have been the
author of the majority of the messages on this list, and I had started to
wonder whether it still served a useful purpose.  However, I have just got
back from an "International Workshop on Historical GIS in Shanghai" (...
that we should live to see the day), and various people there were members,
said the list was serving a useful function, but also said they were having
problems SENDING to the list.  In which case I need to apologise, and
suggest possible reasons:

(1) Last year, the old "Mailbase" service, based at Newcastle in England,
was replaced by the new "JISCMail" service, operated by the
Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory.  This change was simply to do with funding
-- Newcastle were doing a good job, and so are RAL.  It does mean, however,
that messages should be sent to "[log in to unmask]", and the
list's web archive is at:

        http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/history-gis.html

(2) To make it harder to send out junk mail over the list, only list
members can send mail to it (anyone else should send mail to
"[log in to unmask]", for manual authorisation by the
owner, i.e. me).  NB THIS WILL CAUSE A PROBLEM IF YOU HAVE CHANGED YOUR
E-MAIL ADDRESS SINCE YOU JOINED.  The list has been running for five years,
and many of us have changed address (and maybe jobs) since then.  So long
as your old account still exists, and you have set it to automatically
forward to your new address, you will still be RECEIVING messages via the
list -- but if you try to SEND messages they will be rejected because your
are NOT registered as a member under your new address.  What you need to do is:

1.      Leave the list from your old account.  The easiest way to do this is via
the JISCmail web site.  Go to the above address, and click on the "Join or
leave the JISCmail list" link;  then type in your OLD e-mail address and
click on the "Leave the list" option.  This will result in a message being
sent by JISCmail to that address, and you only actually leave the list when
you either reply to that message or click on the hyperlink the message
contains.

2.      Join the list from the new account.  Again, the easiest way is via the
JISCmail web site, using the "Join or leave the JISCmail list" link.  This
again involves replying to an e-mailed request for confirmation.

NB (1) The above method for leaving the list will not work if you lack
access to your old account -- but in that case you are presumably not
reading this!  Unlike Mailbase, JISCmail does automatically identify and
delete "dead" list members.  (2) As far as I can discover, there is no way
of changing your e-mail address via the JISCmail site, as distinct from
leaving and re-joining.  This would be particularly useful if there was a
method for changing your address for ALL the lists you subscribe to.

(c)  Finally, while it is good to know that the list is useful even if it
is just a soap box for myself (thanks in particular to Larry Crissman and
Brandon Plewe), I hope more people will start using the list to make
announcements and, in particular, as a forum for debate.  The Shanghai
meeting was a very valuable chance for people from literally all over the
world to discuss technicalities;  it included researchers from Australia,
Belgium, China, Germany, Russia, Taiwan, the UK and the US.  However, such
opportunities are inevitably rare and a specialised research community
really needs to make more use of electronic fora for debate.  This list is
not the only possible venue, but it does perhaps have two advantages:

1.      It is hosted on a professionally run list-serv, with an associated web
site.  JISC-mail has long term funding and costs us nothing.

2.      This is a general purpose list for pretty much any topic that falls
within the field of historical GIS.  Using this list does not imply a
connection with the Great Britain Historical GIS project or any other
project, and you are not supporting any particular data model or meta-data
standard either explicitly or implicitly.

The standard JISCmail conditions of use mean that any commercial
announcements should be sent to "[log in to unmask]" for
approval, not directly to the list, and you are asked to avoid including
large file attachments.  The best way to make long documents or other large
files available is to put them on your web site and then post an
announcement to the list, including a hyper-link to the file.  NB many
sensible e-mail users refuse to open attachments sent by people they do not
know, because of the virus risk, so they are maybe best avoided altogether,
large or small.

Best wishes,

Humphrey Southall
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    ======================================================
Humphrey Southall
Reader in Geography/Director, Great Britain Historical GIS Project
Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth

Buckingham Building, Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE

Until September 2001:

Visiting Scholar, St. Catharine's College,
Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RL

Portsmouth HGIS team: (023) 9284 2500
Cambridge Tel:  (01223) 523854
Mobile: (0796) 808 5454