Case Studies: St. John's University

Over the last few years, St. John's University Information Center LISTSERV^® mailing list service has become a focal point for Human Services and related lists such as Education, Psychology, Medicine, Community, Disability and Support and so forth. As of September 2002, there were almost 700 such lists totaling almost 220,000 subscribers, with a volume of more than 700,000 messages per day, making St. John's University the largest academic LISTSERV site in the world. L-Soft's LISTSERV is more than a mailing list program. At St. John's, it has been a catalyst for academic collaboration.

The years of 1995 through 1997 have shown a major growth in mailing list activity. There are more than 160 Psychology related lists including PsyNetUSA, which includes a list for every state where discussion focuses on state issues in Psychology.

At the same time, a center for disability and rehabilitation has emerged from the 100 lists that are aimed at the professionals and consumers associated with the social, medical and community aspects of physical disadvantages. There has always been an emphasis on accommodating those with educational disability, but recently a large number of lists on Internet technology in education have emerged.

Work has been accomplished on the development of a WWW interface for the lists. With the 1.8d LISTSERV features it has made it easy to organize the web archives as well as manage the configurations and options of each list from the web. Each mailing list has its own page, which provides information about the list, access to the archives and links to related material. These links also provide historical information and complement the list archives, serving as a Library of Current Events in that area.

The SJUOWNER list has been created for the list owners at St. John's and serves as a help desk, an information center for local news and a clearing house for information specific to Human Services.

Case study written in March 1998 with the assistance of Dr. Bob Zenhausern, St. John's University Information Center for Human Services.

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