Dear SERIALST subscribers:

We are writing today to let you know what's going to happen shortly with
this email list.

SERIALST has always been hosted by the University of Vermont, where our
founder, Birdie MacLennan, worked. With her death earlier this year, we
realized the university would probably not want to continue hosting the
list permanently. We began searching for a new host.

We quickly settled on NASIG, the North American Serials Interest Group:
http://www.nasig.org/
as a potential new home. NASIG is well-known within the serials
community, and has experience hosting and managing their own web and
email services. All the people involved with running SERIALST have been
active NASIG members. NASIG's philosophy of being a common forum for all
parties in the serials community (aggregators, libraries, publishers,
subscription agents, etc.) fits very well with the way SERIALST has
always worked.

When we approached them, NASIG was immediately interested in the idea,
and negotiations have moved quickly to fruition.  So, on a date in the
near future, SERIALST will transition from the University of Vermont's
servers to NASIG's. The list archives will also move to a NASIG server.

The immediate effects will be fairly minimal:
* Subscribers will *not* have to re-subscribe to the list; your
subscription and settings should be ported to NASIG with little or no
difficulty.
* NASIG has contracted with L-Soft to provide list-hosting services.
Since L-Soft currently provides those same services for the Univ. of
Vermont, that should make the transition especially easy.
* The email address for sending messages to the list will change. We'll
send the new address to the list once the transition timetable is settled.
* The web address of the archives will change, but the full archive of
past messages will continue to be available.

Though there may be minor changes, NASIG plans to generally continue the
editorial policies currently in place, which can be found at:
http://www.uvm.edu/~bmaclenn/serialst.html
SERIALST will still be open to everyone; there will be no expectation
that people be NASIG members to participate in the list. NASIG will
continue to run their own listserv, NASIG-L, for communicating with
their membership.

The list will be moderated by members of NASIG's Communications and
Marketing Committee, with Beth Ashmore of Samford University as the lead
moderator.

More details will follow shortly, including a timeline for the
migration. In the meantime, please feel free to contact us if you have
questions.

Yours,
Stephen Clark (sdclar@wm.edu)
Ann Ercelawn (ann.ercelawn@vanderbilt.edu)
Bob Persing (persing@pobox.upenn.edu)
SERIALST associate moderators

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