Holday Greetings! December 1 has come and gone and the new archive system has not been implemented at RootsWeb. On or about 01 Dec, Karen Isaacson reported to the Listowners that it might be another two weeks before the Archives were ready. Yesterday, Marc Nozell (who has been developing the "threaded message" archives) notifed Listowners that: >Currently 542 lists have requested that they be archived on the web. >To date, only 487 have had any messages sent to them since they made >the request, so there are slightly fewer mailing lists found on: > http://lists.rootsweb.com/~archiver/lists/ A brief visit to this page, confirms the following: BLANCHARD-L is one of the 500+/- lists at Marc's site. At present, only messages from Nov/Dec 1997 are available and these are not identified by their latest/xx number. The archive is set up with monthly directories (Nov, Dec 1997, at present) Messages are arranged approximately by posting date but neither date or message # (latest/xx) have been used to order the messages. Messages are identified by Subject: and, if you visit the BLANCHARD-L site, you will see the importance of using meaningful and consistent Subject: lines. If you go to the Thread Index, you will find the messages grouped somewhat according to message subject or thread. Here again, you can see the importance of entering a new Subject: line or, if your message refers to a previous message, use something like: Re: James Blanchard, Rutland, VT. _ _ _ _ _ I was waiting to hear more about the final RootsWeb Archive/Search situation so I could give you as accurate a review as possible. However, as long as we are talking about archives I'll throw in a few observations about the demonstration mail list search page at: http://searches.rootsweb.com/example.html that I described briefly in "RootsWeb Archives report" (latest /295) on 19 Nov. It <have> been able to retrieve separate list digests but <not> separate mail messages. For example, if you search the Keithley List, and enter "digest v/97/11" in the search window, you will retrieve Digest #11 for 1997. However, if you enter "latest /50" or "mail latest /50", you <will not> be able to retrieve mail message #50. Perhaps I do not have the correct syntax and must wait until Karen gives us a set of instructions. At least it appears that, if we know what Digest a message is in, we can retrieve the Digest and then sort through to find the message. I hope that the final search procedure will be able to do better than this! Brief Summary: It still appears that there will be <two> archive/search web sites 1. One as represented by the demo mail list search page (Rev. War, Keithley, et al) and 2. Another separate site as represented by Marc Nozell's site which now has 500+/- mail lists on it. If this is true, please don't ask me to explain why there will be two web sites rather than a single site and an e-mail access like the present SmartList. I haven't seen any new information about the status of the old MAISER list message archives. All we know is that they exist somewhere at RootsWeb but how they are to be integrated with the RootsWeb archived messages, is a mystery. If any of you BLANCHARD-L members / Listowners out there have new light to shed on the Archives situation, don't hesitate to share it with the List. Final word: I really can use your help with the Index-Lines database. Until we decide that the new RootsWeb archive/search procedures will meet our needs and Index-Lines are no longer required, I'd like to continue maintaing the database. If each member supplies Lines for their posts, it is much easier for me to add them periodically to the database. Thanks. Fletch