One thing to consider is that setting up and maintaining a home page is a
significant amount of work if the page is to have any significant content.
Just as we have been dependent on Ken Robson's expertice to set up and
trouble-shooot the list serve, I suspect we will need some expertice to help
maintain the page. Expectations of web pages are increasing as JAVA and
Frames and other dynamic tools make commercially produced pages look very
slick. We do not want our page to look dowdy by comparison.
One key item that has frustrated me about the PIUG list and would be an
excellent plus for any web page would be the presentation of a dynamic
archive of the conversations that are carried on on the PIUG list. This was
the point of my presentation at the PIUG meeting in washington although I'm
not certain how well this point came across. Our current list archive is
old, batch, unfriendly software. If the list fed into a newgroup, it could
be picked up by services such as DejaView and others searching for patent
information could discover that we exist. An archive on our own web page
similar to that of DejaView (or AltaVista or Excite) would be a great
improvement.
We also need to begin building the Patent Knowledge base. This could be the
cream of the crop of the items posted to the PIUG board organized into
topics such as
1) impacts of the new US patent law
2) Vendors - new features (such as Orbit's PowerSearch or STN's SmartSelect)
3) indexing foibles such as the @@@ in Claims' priority fields
4) Tips on crossfile searching
5) Links to Vendor pages with "Knowledge Base" type items
Somehow all this needs to be maintained over an extended period of time. So
as we plan what should go on the web page. We should ask the question not
only "What do we want" but also "What can we maintain?" and "Who will
decicate the time to maintain it?". The list serve has required more time
than I had originally anticipated, but then again I learned more than I had
anticipated so it was a good trade-off.
So to summarize, my two suggestions are:
1) Create an automatic archive that dynamically grows as messages are posted
to the PIUG list and which can display a list of titles on a web page,
similar to newsgroups.
2) Build the "Patent Knowledge Database" by accumulating the best items from
the PIUG list and organizing them into topics (again similar to a
newsgroup). Provide links to the growing collection of patent information
on the web.
We could also have a monthly "best posting of the month" contest and
highlight each months' best posting. This would tend to encourage "meatier"
postings to the list.
Sandra
-- =============================================================== Sandra Unger | Mail: ssunger@erenj.com | (908) 474-6605 ===============================================================