8.0101 HUMBUL - The Humanities Bulletin Board (1/57)
Elaine Brennan (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Sun, 17 Jul 1994 19:28:58 EDT
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 8, No. 0101. Sunday, 17 Jul 1994.
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 1994 10:59:42 +0100
From: Stuart Lee <stuart@vax.ox.ac.uk>
Subject: HUMBUL - The Humanities Bulletin Board
HUMBUL - The Humanities Bulletin Board (Report)
For some years now the Office for Humanities Communication has been maintaining
an electronic Bulletin Board for the Humanities, known as HUMBUL (now based at
Oxford). When established it was seen that there was a need for a central
location at which humanities academics could access (remotely) information on
various associations, institutions, projects, etc, of interest to humanities
computing. Such a central resource was clearly lacking in the mid-eighties and
HUMBUL was designed to fill this gap.
Written under the USERBUL software (designed at Leicester University) HUMBUL
ran successfully for nearly eight years. For the last three years it has been
my responsibility to edit and maintain the various sections. At its peak it
attracted over 5,000 subscribers and was accessed nearly 1,000 times a month.
However, due to the substantial increase in electronic resources, gopher sites,
world-wide-web pages, and software to aid the accessing and searching of the
Internet, HUMBUL began to look like a bit of a dinosaur. This, coupled with the
fact that USERBUL was no longer operational with the installation of new
software at Oxford University, has meant that the policy of maintaining such a
large resource has had to be reviewed. Before considering the possibility of
moving HUMBUL to a gopher site I researched the resources available to
academics through the Internet. It was clear that whereas in the mid-eighties
HUMBUL was a good central point for most scholars, now, with the advent of WWW,
Gopher, VERONICA, etc, the gap that needed to be filled all those years ago was
no longer there. Consequently, the decision has been taken to close down HUMBUL
as of July, 1994.
Nevertheless, the name still lives on. As part of the growing need for gateways
to other resources, I have established the HUMBUL Gateway which provides a
means of accessing international resources applicable to the humanities with
relative ease. The time and effort spent on maintaining the old bulletin board
will now be diverted to the updating of this web service. To access this you
need a WWW viewer such as Mosiac, Lynx, etc. The address is:
http://www.ox.ac.uk/depts/humanities/
I would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who have helped in the
running of HUMBUL for so long, be they support staff, or contributors.
Particular thanks to the following without whom HUMBUL would not have been the
success it clearly was: Paul Bryant, Marilyn Deegan, Dave Hastings, Susan
Hockey, May Katzen, Jim Morris, and Chris Mullings.
Stuart Lee
HUMBUL Editor, 1991-1994
****************************
Dr Stuart Lee
Research Officer
CTI Centre for Textual Studies
Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road
Oxford
OX2 6NN
Tel:0865-273221/283282
Fax:0865-273221
E-mail: Stuart.Lee@oucs.ox.ac.uk