Barney's primary purpose is to provide academic services to faculty and students. These services include e-mail, software requested by the faculty (e.g., statistics packages, engineering software, etc.), the Usenet newsfeed, listservs, and beginning in May of 1997, student web pages. These services are available to all faculty and students currently working at or attending Gonzaga. This document will describe what specific services the faculty have available to them for their classes.

There are two specific services that are available to faculty for disseminating information to and between students. These are listservs and Usenet news.

Mailing Lists (listservs)

Listservs are mailing distribution lists. When someone mails to the listserv's address, the message is resent to everyone that is "subscribed" to that listserv. The number of subscribers to a list can range anywhere from one person to hundreds of thousands. The listserv software on Barney is meant to handle smaller lists (<1000 subscribers) such as classes, academic discussion lists, etc.

The primary benefit of listservs is that the message is sent directly to the subscriber's e-mail address. This ensures that each and every subscriber receives the message as long as they check their e-mail. It also makes it easy for the person to respond back to the list or the original sender because the message is no different than any other e-mail message. With the added benefit of users being able to subscribe or unsubscribe from the list whenever they choose, using a listserv is an easy and flexible way to distribute information to students in a class, colleagues, etc.

There are only a few drawbacks of using listservs over other methods for distributing information. The first is that a copy of the message is sent to each and every subscriber. This can result in significant disk space consumption if there are a lot of subscribers on a single server (i.e., Barney) or if there are a lot of documents or files passed back and forth over the list. Another minor inconvenience is that many mail packages don't thread mail messages making a conversation slightly more difficult to follow. Finally, there is no automatic archiving of messages sent to the list; the individual subscribers are responsible for keeping any messages they want to keep.

Listserv services are available on Barney for faculty, staff, and student groups. To request that a list be created on Barney, browse to http://barney.gonzaga.edu/tech/listrequest.html.

Newsgroups (Usenet)

Messages posted to newsgroups are not distributed to individuals the same way they are with mailing lists. A message that is sent to a newsgroup is referred to as an article and is posted to an NNTP server. The NNTP server then transfers the article to other NNTP servers that it is connected which then forward them to other NNTP servers and so on until the article is distributed to all of the NNTP servers on the Internet (thousands) that 'carry' the newsgroup where the article was posted. There are more than 30,000 public newsgroups of which Gonzaga's NNTP server (news.gonzaga.edu) carries about 15,00. In addition a server can have private newsgroups that are not distributed outside of the local NNTP server. Gonzaga currently has fifteen private newsgroups for class use, announcements, computer help, etc.

There are several advantages of newsgroups over mailing lists and several disadvantages as well. The two primary benefits of newsgroups are that most newsreaders automatically thread the messages to simplify reading of prolonged discussions and that the messages are archived for the entire semester. Also, newsgroups require a lot less disk space since only one copy of the article is stored on each server. For a private group, the article is only stored once.

There are a number of disadvantages to using newsgroups that make them unsuitable for many purposes. The primary disadvantage is that the user needs to go and get the article rather than having the message mailed directly to them. Second, off-campus students may have some difficulty getting to Barney to read the newsgroups, especially if they have an account on AOL or some other online service that connects to the Internet. Finally, the newsreader (slrn on Barney, tin on Betty) can be somewhat cumbersome to learn.

To create a newsgroup for a class or club, contact .

Summary

As a rule of thumb when deciding whether to use a newsgroup or a mailing list, consider the audience. If you have a specific audience, their e-mail addresses are readily available, and they want to receive all of the messages, then a mailing list is probably the better choice. If your audience is broad, the users are difficult to identify, or the amount of traffic is high, then a newsgroup might be the better choice. The following list of features may be helpful for those trying to decide whether to use a mailing list or newsgroup.

Any questions or requests for additional services should be directed to .