Dear SERIALST subscribers:

We'd like to try an experiment with SERIALST, beginning this week.

SERIALST receives many advertising messages from commercial bodies
(publishers, agents, consultants, etc.), which the moderators don't pass
on to the list.  We do post messages from these same people or companies
that are primarily informational, or that are participating in list
discussions.

We get a third type of message, though: a mix of information and
promotion.  We moderators often agonize among ourselves over these,
saying, "The information would be interesting to our readers -- if only
it weren't surrounded by so much advertising..."  Sometimes we end up
rejecting these messages; other times, we ask the sender to rewrite
them, including only the informational portions.

We'd like to try a new approach.  Once a week, we're going to send a
"commercial digest" message to the list, containing these "mixed"
messages, unedited.  The digest will contain a preface explaining its
purpose.  If you're interested, you can read the messages and see what
the publishers and vendors are saying to you.  If you don't want this
sort of content, though, you can just delete the message unread.

(Those messages which are purely advertising, with little or no
informational content, will not be included in the digest -- they'll
still be rejected.)

The first digest message will be sent tomorrow.  Please let us know what
you think of this idea.  Contact information for the SERIALST moderators
is at:
http://www.uvm.edu/~bmaclenn/serialst.html#contacts

Thanks,
Bob Persing
SERIALST associate moderator