LISNews: Librarian News

I'm just tossing this out to see if there's any hope of reviving an interesting but dormant effort. (LISNews has a bigger audience than Cites & Insights, although a smaller one--I assume--than American Libraries, where I've also discussed this.)

COWLZ, the Consortium/Coalition/Committee Of Web-based Library Zines and newsletters, was an effort to follow up Marylaine Block's Ex Libris essay,
"Who's going to preserve zine content?"

I commented on it in Cites & Insights in May 2002, October 2002 and probably elsewhere (those are the only major essays that jump out from the Contents list).

A somewhat closed Topica discussion list drew a dozen or so zine/newsletter publishers and some very helpful people--Dan Lester, who provided disk space for a COWLZ archive (which also serves as the home for Cites & Insights) and Eric Lease Morgan, who put together a database and dark-archive harvest mechanism for the effort, among them.

And that's been about it.

I'm not sure that this is a call for renewed effort and excitement. Maybe it's just a recognition that we're all busy people and that the effort wasn't going to achieve the kind of recognition/publicity/etc. that was hoped for.

Comments welcome. If there are people who think there's still something there, maybe COWLZ could start up again. Maybe not.