Thanks to all of you who took the time to reply to my question concerning
ways of handling the flood of information. Here is a short summary:
Many seem to agree upon that the information overload is hard to handle and
- if properly done - a rather time consuming task. Nevertheless there is a
wealth of information on this and other reflectors, a lot of wheat among
the chaff and occasionally some real gems (N1LO).
Different systems of organizing the content of the messages are used but
there seem to be 3 principal methods:
1) Make folders for the topics you are especially interested in (eg
"Antennas", "Propagation", "Contesting"...) and distribute the incoming
messages to them. Important: delete immediately whatever is not interesting
- now or never (YO3CTK). Save the ones you want for future reference on zip
disks (WA4EMR).
2) Open a document in the word processor, open the mail program and cut and
paste whole messages or part of them into the document (N1LO). Later you
divide the text into different chapters, similar to the folder-method. Or
you save each important message in a txt-file which you may later collapse
back to one file (K1VR). This method enables you to search for a special
item using the word processor's built-in search engine.
3) Make printouts of interesting articles and put them in a notebook or in
different ("real") folders (KB0ONF). Good for people whose eyes do not
tolerate long sessions at the monitor.
For finding information on a certain topic I was referred to the archives.
Some of you however pointed out that this might also be a chore as you can
only search on message subject, not message text.
Thanks once more for all those useful hints!
73 de Hubert
Vienna
BTW, my compliments to Dave WA4EMR "collecting hobbies as a hobby"), who
manages to read and evaluate the messages from 12 reflectors...
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