If historians want to be represented on the information superhighway, they and their organizations need to become active participants in the information process, ensuring that future programs for training in the humanities do not exclude history. Without such representation, histo rians will be on the equivalent of the interstate ramps that were built before the highway itself. They will be there, hanging in the air with others speeding past, but will lack the connectivity that will make the highway a meaningful part of their academic and

I have touched briefly on what I consider to be some important sources for the newly wired historian and suggested that the challenges that this part of the humanistic disciplines face will affect other humani ties disciplines as well. I have not touched on such important topics as WAIS, an acronym for Wide Area Information System, which pro vides access to diverse information resources, or the WORLD WIDE WEB, commonly abbreviated as WWW or simply W3, a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative that intends to provide universal access to Internet documents, or any of the other new tech nical innovations in existence or being planned to ease Internet access and use.

tion. Since electronic publications and/or editorial work have not, at least not as far as discussions that have appeared on the HUMANIST and other listservers suggest, achieved the same level of recognition as works published in traditional sources, some changes are needed to provide the stability that electronic res

That is clearly no longer the case. I know personally of five closed lists and was accepted as a subscriber to two of them, but their owners have requested that I reveal neither their existence nor their addresses. It is hard to discover purposely hidden resources. These five may be just hints of a trend that will result in a relatively closed system in which elite scholars, wherever they are located in the world, will utilize private and specialized mailing lists—that, by the way, do not appear in any of the general directories—as their real forum for infor mation interchange

n active listserv will generate is growing exponentially and is derived from an increasingly diverse population. As a result, the "noise" to information ratio is rising and unwanted information crowds the listserver. Even after dropping off several lists, I receive more than 100 messages a day which consume at least an hour each morning despite expediency necessitated pr

from railroads to

There are five factors involved with listservers: quantity, quality, scholarly withdrawal from general lists, cost, and the structure of the professional reward system that might affect these potentially important tools in the future