LINGUIST List 10.1949

Fri Dec 17 1999

All: LINGUIST Vacation, LSA Invitation

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

Helen Aristar Dry, LSA

Message 1: LINGUIST Vacation

Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 23:02:07 -0500 (EST)
From: Helen Aristar Dry <hdrylinguistlist.org>
Subject: LINGUIST Vacation

LINGUIST will be on vacation from December 22 through January 9, 2000. Any messages we receive before midnight on December 21 will be posted before we shut down for the holidays. Except for emergencies, any we receive after that will be posted when we return from the annual meeting of the LSA. (see message #2) We'll post urgent messages even during the break, but since we won't be logging on to the LINGUIST account every day, you need to call our attention to your posting. Please put "URGENT" in the subject line, send the message to linguistlinguistlist.org, and also send a copy to a moderator. We wish you all a wonderful holiday season and a successful New Year! The LINGUIST staff:

Message 2: LSA

Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 23:06:25 -0500 (EST)
From: Helen Aristar Dry <hdrylinguistlist.org>
Subject: LSA

No, we are not virtual people... The LINGUIST crew will materialize, in the flesh, at the annual meeting of the LSA. We'd like to talk with you and listen to your comments about LINGUIST. We'd especially like to hear your suggestions about 2 exciting new projects. The first of these enterprises, for which we recently received funding from the NSF, is the archiving of multiple linguistics- and language-related mailing lists on our site. We want to set up one central site where all, or most, of the lists relevant to the discipline will be available, and where a researcher will be able to search all of them at once, tracking down in one operation all mailing list postings that might be relevant to his or her research. We already archive some 56 linguistic lists, which you can see at the URL: http://linguistlist.org/list-archives.html but we would like to have your suggestions for making the archive as comprehensive and useful as possible. We would especially like to hear from list owners who might wish to participate in this project. We'd like to emphasize that joining this archive will entail no extra work on your part, nor will you have to change the way your list is run, or where it is run from. All that is required is your permission to subscribe our site to your list. The second and perhaps most important of our projects, however, is to produce a single search facility which ranges over ALL the information on the LINGUIST site. We intend to categorize all the information we store by linguistic subfield and language treated (where relevant), so that anyone working on, say, Russian syntax, would be able to type in either "Russian" or "syntax" and access at one click all the dissertation abstracts, book or journal announcements, calls for papers, course syllabi, names of linguists or programs specializing in these areas, etc., which are listed on the LINGUIST site. We also intend to begin collecting other types of information, e.g., on talks and papers delivered, bibliographies, unpublished grammars, and sound files. Our hope is to produce a truly comprehensive, truly international archive of electronic information and meta-information. But it's a very ambitious project! And we need your ideas and your support to make it successful. We would welcome the chance to discuss these in person. We would also like to introduce our excellent student crew. If you have appreciated their hard work this year--as we certainly have! -- please take a moment to stop by and make their acquaintance. We will be in PDR #1 on Friday, January 7th from 9-10 am, and from 2-4 pm on Saturday, January 8th. We hope to see you then. Sincerely, Helen, Anthony, Andrew