You don't know what you've got till its gone.
They paint paradise and put up a parking lot.
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For those of you who follow the macintosh newsgroups, you may have
already seen this. I was going to write my own version of this, but
I felt my collegue had already summed it very nicely. So here is his
letter which echos my feelings.
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Dear mac-archive-user....
I have some very very disturbing and shocking (at least for me) news
to relay to you....
Due to budget constraints at the U-M Information Technology Division,
a tenative decision has been made to cut and cease support of the largely
volunteer archive service (i.e. mac.archive.umich.edu, msdos.archive.umich.edu,
next.archive.umich.edu, linguistics.archive, atari, etc.).
Here is a copy of the message I received about a half hour ago
from my supervisor on the project:
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Message-Id: <9202140448.AA08771 at terminator.cc.umich.edu>
To: all-archivists at terminator.cc.umich.edu
Subject: Death of the Archives?
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 92 23:48:01 -0500
From: "Fred Swartz" <swartz at terminator.cc.umich.edu>
... ...I don't know exactly how this will
affect the 0.25 part of Allan and Mike that RS pays for, perhaps CSS
and CITI will pick it up. I'll let you know when/if I find out.
When I talked to Mike Clark (my manager in Research Systems) about
continuing the archives on volunteer power (as it largely runs right
now), he was very negative on the idea, but failed to supply a
convincing argument for abandoning it. I'm stunned and upset.
The Archives have managed very well on volunteer effort up til now and
it seems to me that something else is going on other than a genuine
concern for serving the users.
I don't know what this means for the Archives, although they aren't
going to be turned off tomorrow. I'll let you know whatever I find out
as soon as I can.
-- Fred
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I talked on the phone with Fred and we both agree that this decision
seems very unfair to both the students/faculty who use the archives
here at the University of Michigan, and you... the users on the
Internet, Bitnet, UUCP, etc.
To me, it doesn't make much sense to cut off support for the archives.
Both I and Allan make around $70 a week working on the archives (I work
on the Mac side, he works on the msdos side).. the rest of the time
we spend is voluntary, like the twenty or so other people who add/keep
up the archives here. The archives are probably one of the most popular
and beneficial services that ITD offers. There may be other ways to trim
the budget, but cutting off something that costs nearly nothing
to begin with doesn't seem very wise.
Please help us out. E-mail in support of our archives can be sent
to archive.support at mac.archive.umich.edu. We don't want to flood the
senior managers' mailboxes, and we're still thinking about what we
can do to save our archives. Comments can be sent
to us at "comments at mac.archive.umich.edu". To address the entire
archive group, you may send e-mail to "all-archivists at terminator.cc.umich.edu".
Thanks....
mike at mac.archive.umich.edu
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As for myself, I'll willingly continue to maintain the archives for
free. I just don't know at this time if I would have anything
to maintain.
We (the msdos archive) probably haven't become as popular as our
mac counterpart, but we would very much like to continue to operate
so we can finish all the plans we have and become a truly first rate
archive.
Please, if you have found our service useful (minimal as it is right
now) send a message of support to archive.support at mac.archive.umich.edu.
Thank you.
--Allan
allan at terminator.cc.umich.edu
