Aittvax.174
net.news
utzoo!decvax!ittvax!swatt
Sun Jan  3 17:40:33 1982
YANS (Yet Another Newsgroup Suggestion)
This seems like a more profitable discussion than net censorship.
Does anyone out there familiar with the Library of Congress scheme
care to summarize the pros and cons?

The matter of keeping a LC dictionary around should not be a
major discouragement -- once assembled it can be kept current
with far less effort than the map of UNIX sites on USENET.


       From decvax!duke!reed!valer Sat Jan  2 08:31:26 1982
       Alan--
               I was talking to Dave K. the other day, lamenting
       the proliferation of newsgroups, and he pointed out that
       what is really lacking is a proper categorization scheme.
       Hence, I advocate the adoption of the Library of Congress
       system.  It has the advantages of being well known, expandable
       in a predictable manner, and committed to expansion for many
       years to come.  Note the ease of not receiving undesirable
       newsgroups!-- "No, I am not interested in literary criticisms
       of Christmas lyrics" and so forth.
               I admit there are some disadvantages.  The mapping
       from intelligible subjects to the appropriate numbers would
       require a rather well refined catalogue, and the questions
       of whether each article is entitled to a unique number of its
       own deserves some thought.  If the latter is true, then I suppose
       the Library of Congress would have to get on the network in
       order to keep abreast of the latest developments....
               I trust all is well, etc.
                                               --Jim Valerio

       From cbosgd!mark Sun Jan  3 17:25:11 1982
       To: duke!swd, duke!trt,
           ittvax!swatt, ucbvax!william
       Subject: Re:  YANS (Yet Another Newsgroup Suggestion)
       Cc: reed!valer, lauren@ucla-security, ucbvax!r:glickman

       This is interesting - why not suggest it to net.news and see
       what people think?  I agree that the library of congress
       scheme, with numbers and a few letters, is more powerful and
       less intelligible than the current scheme.  I also suspect that
       some other problems would arise:
       (1) The current scheme lets you specify the distribution scope
           with the first part of the newsgroup name.
       (2) The LC scheme might not allow very specific subgroups
           (could it distinguish between fa.space and net.columbia, or
           between net.jokes and net.jokes.q)?  I don't know the
           answer to this.
       (3) Everybody would have to keep a LC dictionary handy to be
           able to use netnews.  (It's just about to the point where
           you need a netnews newsgroup list now anyway.)

       I don't know the answers here, and I'm not very familiar with LC.
       But it seems like food for thought anyway.

               Mark

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