Do you subscribe to electronic discussion groups (a.k.a. listservs) or electronic newsletters, but find that you receive more e-mail than you can keep up with? Or did you receive a note requesting you delete some of your e-mail left on Winnefox's e-mail server? If so, maybe the following options will help you put your e-mail account on a "diet."

1) If an electronic discussion group has an archive of postings, consider unsubscribing and checking the archive on an "as needed" basis. Some of the archived library electronic discussion groups that are around include Publib and Publib-Net, Fiction-L, and Stumpers. Many archives offer a search function, as well as making the postings sortable by date or subject.

2) If you subscribe to e-mail newsletters that are also archived on the Web, like The Scout Report or the Librarians' Index to the Internet New This Week Mailing List maybe you'd like to try using Netmind instead.

Use Netmind's Quick Add to keep track of any web sites you choose. In the case of an electronic newsletter, you can ask NetMind to keep a watch on the "index" of issues (like this one for Computers In Libraries). Then Minder Wizard will automagically send you an e-mail message each time the Web page is updated or changed.

Since you'll only be receiving a notice instead of the actual newsletter, your electronic mailbox will be receiving a much smaller message -- anywhere from 10 to 20 times smaller than the actual newsletter itself. If you use Pine it means the amount of space your e-mail takes up on the server will be reduced, and if you use Netscape's e-mail application it will reduce the load on our server as well.

If you have trouble with a Web page taking forever to load, try clicking browser's "Stop" button, then click the "Reload" button. This sometimes "un-jams" a Web page as its bit make their way to your computer.

The scroll bar in any Windows-based application (such as a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, or Web page in Netscape) is along the edge of the application's window. The scroll bar can be thought of as kind of an "elevator shaft". Inside the scroll bar a scroll box travels up and down as you move up and down through a document. In fact, the scroll box is a visual cue that tells you whether you're near the top of a document, the middle, or the bottom.

I'm sure you already know the basics of scrolling up and down, but here are some tips to speed up your scrolling:

• Rather than clicking the Up and Down arrows on the vertical scroll bar to move in small increments or line by line, click and drag the scroll box.
• You can still use the Up and Down arrows on the scroll bar to move quickly through a document if you hold down the mouse button while the mouse pointer is over the arrow.
• Position your mouse pointer on the scroll bar above the scroll box and click once -- the document will move up one page. The same holds true for positioning your mouse pointer below the scroll box and clicking -- your view moves one page down. If you do so and also hold the mouse button down you'll move through the document even faster.
• Want to move through a document in a hurry? Position your mouse pointer on the scroll box, hold down the mouse button, and drag the scroll box up or down inside the scroll bar.
• And if your mouse is out of commission, or you just prefer to use the keyboard instead, the PageUp and PageDown buttons will get you around a document, as will the up and down arrow keys.
• Horizontal scroll bars that run along the bottom of a window can move your view from side to side rather than up and down, and are most often seen in spreadsheets.

February is Library Lovers Month, so visit the Friends of California Libraries to find all kinds of ideas you can use to promote library use in your area, including "Take A Librarian To Lunch". They even offer a sample proclamation you can use as a model for making Library Lovers Month official in your own town or city!

This issue of The Ides was written on January 15, 2000

The Ides is written by Joy Schwarz.
Please direct any questions, comments or recipes to schwarz@winnefox.org

URL: http://www.winnefox.org/ides/idesjan00.html