Hat tip to Steve Lastres for stressing the upcoming change in AALL’s move away from listservs for its Special Interest Sections (SIS), Caucuses and Leadership listservs, to an online eGroup Discussion List starting on August 1st. For those of us in ILTA, the eGroup platform won’t be a big deal, but for those unfamiliar with the eGroup platform, it may take some getting use to.

However, the most important thing to do right now is to make sure you update your eGroup settings are set up correctly. Currently, the default setting for the eGroups is “Digest,” which means you’ll receive one email a day for all activity on the discussion group. If you want “Real Time” (and you know you do!!) then you’ll need to go in and change the default setting to change it to “Real Time.” You can also set it to either “Digest” or even “No Email” if you want to keep all the communications out of your email (you just have to remember to go to the Community website for any new messages.) One other option to keep it out of your email is that you can have all of the conversations of these groups going to your RSS feed reader.

Here’s the steps you need to do to change your eGroup settings to Real Time:

1. Go to the AALL Community website – http://community.aallnet.org – and sign in

2. In the “Our Community” Section, click on the link to adjust your subscription settings

3. Find the eGroups you want to bet updates from, and select “Real Time” and save your settings

4. You may need to go to your email SPAM filter and add the following two addresses to the white list to make sure they aren’t pushed into your Postini or other SPAM filter files.
  • noreply@egroups.aallnet.org
  • noreply@notifications.aallnet.org

Eventually, all of the AALL listservs will go away and you’ll have to post your messages through the eGroup platform. I think most of the ILTA members will agree that it is a good way to post questions to a list, and a good platform to organize the information.

Remember this is only for those official AALL listservs. So, listservs like Law-Lib or PrivateLawLibraries will continue to be email based systems and won’t change. You’ll still get all those Ron Huttner, Leslie Germaine and ILL request emails in real time, directly to your inbox. 
Here is the email that AALL’s Chris Sawa sent out on the topic:

SUBJECT: SIS Discussion List UpgradeI hope you’ve had an opportunity to explore the new My Communities section of AALLNET. Every SIS community has an eGroup feature that will replace our current discussion list<http://share.aallnet.org/read/> function. On August 1, we will migrate all the main SIS discussion lists to the new eGroups. All of the old messages will remain archived<http://share.aallnet.org/read/>, but the ability to send messages will cease. We will send a follow-up email on July 29 and August 1 to remind everyone that the committee discussion lists will be turned off on August 1.Please note that all other SIS related lists (e.g. SIS committee list) will eventually be turned off too, and the administrators for those lists should create communities for those under the “Member Created Communities” section of My Communities. If those administrators need assistance, I can work with them after all of the main SIS discussion lists have been turned off.All of the main SIS communities are synced with the SIS rosters stored in our membership database, so all current AALL members that are up-to-date with their SIS membership dues can send messages via their SIS’s eGroup now.Please inform your SIS members of the change, and ask them to update their notification settings if they haven’t already.
 1.  To update your notification settings, go to My Communities<http://community.aallnet.org> and click on My Subscriptions under the Discussions tab. Then you may opt to receive notifications in real time, as a daily digest, PDA (real time, but in plain text format for mobile devices), opt to not receive any emails, or unsubscribe altogether. 2.  Please also make sure to whitelist or add to your safe senders the following email addresses:
 1.  noreply@egroups.aallnet.org 2.  noreply@notifications.aallnet.org
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.Christopher SiwaDirector of Information TechnologyAmerican Association of Law Libraries105 W. Adams Street, Suite 3300 | Chicago, IL 60603