To all of you

[Johanna Laakso]

Season's greetings to Uralists and Ura-listers of all confessions, languages
and nationalities!

First of all, I must warn you that the list may, in the worst case, be
practically shut down from 22th December until 7th January.
This, again, is due to my Christmas visit to Finland, during which my access
to the Internet, if any, will be sporadical. My net presence, in turn, is
needed because the
only way to keep spam out of this list is to keep the list moderated, that
is, I have to accept and forward every incoming message.

Secondly, and this is even more important: I would like to express my joy
and gratitude to all those who have contributed to this list in the last few
months. URA-LIST is, finally, showing some modest signs of becoming an
international forum for discussion on Uralistics.

So far, there has been no need to seriously re-think the list policies, nor
have there been any problems with distinguishing genuinely interesting
contributions from sheer spam (of which the moderator receives 2-3
items every day). As most Uralists will understand anyway, the content of
the contributions must be related to the research of the Uralic languages
(and/or adjoining disciplines). The language of the messages may be freely
chosen, keeping in mind that this is an international list. (For lengthier
contributions in languages other than English or German, a short summary or
Zusammenfassung is recommended.) And, of course, the listers are expected to
follow general netiquette rules etc. Considering that all Ura-listers may
not have highly advanced technical resources at their disposal, the format
of the messages should be as simple as possible, that is:

** text-only (no formatting), no attachments.**

But, as already mentioned, there have been no real problems in this respect
so far.

However, I would like to encourage further discussion on list policies. Do
you share my opinion that information on not only symposia and conferences
but also language courses (like the Udmurt courses recently advertised) is
welcome and desirable on URA-LIST? I would also like to see more information
about books and periodicals on relevant themes (although a lot is covered by
the WWW pages of major publishers like SUS
[http://www.helsinki.fi/jarj/sus/], SUA [http://www.s-u-a.de/], EKI
[http://www.eki.ee/], SKS [http://www.finlit.fi/] or Virittäjä
[http://www.helsinki.fi/jarj/kks/virittaja.html], for example). I believe
that information of this kind is still distinguishable from commercial spam
and will not disturb the readers of this list.

I would also like to remind you of the possibility of reading and searching
previous URA-LIST messages. Thanks to the archiving resources of the
LINGUIST list, the archives of URA-LIST as well as many other linguistic
e-mail lists can be found at http://www.linguistlist.org/list-archives.html.

Wishing you happy holidays, and a good start for the year 2001 and the now
officially proclaimed Finno-Ugrian Decade,

Johanna

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Johanna Laakso
Institut für Finno-Ugristik der Universität Wien
Spitalgasse 2-4, Hof 7, A-1090 Wien
johanna.laakso at univie.ac.at | http://mailbox.univie.ac.at/Johanna.Laakso