This Web page is an electronic companion to Chapter 5 of the book Learning to Use the Internet, by Ernest C. Ackermann . It contains links to the Internet resources, sites, and services mentioned in the chapter. Using this you can access them directly, without typing the long addresses or URLs for each item. Please send any comments, questions or suggestions to Ernest Ackermann. For orders or requests for examination copies contact the publisher at jimleisy@fbeedle.com.

Chapter 5: E-mail Group Discussion: Discussion Lists, Interest Groups, Listserv, and Mailing Lists

Illustration by Karl Ackermann.

Finding Names and Addresses of Discussion Groups.

• Search the Directory of Scholarly Electronic Conferences , Copyright 1995 by Diane K. Kovacs, The Directory Team and Kent State University Libraries.
  • Point your Gopher to gopher.usask.ca, (the Gopher server at University of Saskatechewan ), choose "Computing", choose "Internet Information", then choose "Directory of Scholarly Electronic Conferences", and finally choose Search Directory of Scholarly Electronic Conferences
• Search the list of BITNET and Internet lists maintained at Dartmouth College

Internet Sources of Information About Discussion Groups

• How to Find an Interesting Mailing List , by Arno Wouters
• Discussion Lists: Mail Server Commands , by James Milles.
• The global list of Listserv lists. To retrieve a list of Listserv groups, each with a short description, send e-mail to any Listserv site, such as LISTSERV@KENTVM.KENT.EDU with the message LISTS GLOBAL. For example, send e- mail to listserv@kentvm.kent.edu with "lists global" as the body of the message.
• Publicly Available Mailing Lists , Stephanie and Peter DiSilva. The list consists of names, descriptions, and contact addresses for thousands of mailing lists available through the Internet and UUCP. In the hypertext version of Publicly Avalable Mailing Lists the lists are indexed by name and by topic.
  Publicly Available Mailing Lists is also avaialble by anonymous FTP ; a collection of more than twenty files. Use anonymous ftp to rtfm.mit.edu and change directory to pub/usenet/news.answers/mail/mailing-lists to retrieve the files.
• The file interest-groups.txt or List of Lists , currently maintained by Vivian Neou, is one of the oldest list of lists on the Internet.
  You can search the List of Lists on the World Wide Web

Virtual Table of Contents for Learning to Use the Internet

Some other places you may want to visit

Learning to Use the Internet	Learning to Use the World Wide Web	Searching and Researching on the World Wide Web

FROM the fortune list ...

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Benjamin Franklin,