Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.
In the early 1990s and the early days of e-mail, any student was allowed to send a mass e-mail to the rest of the student body. “We thought this was a community that could police itself,” said ITS Director Judy Downing, “but the number of complaints we received about that was staggering, constant, loud, ugly complaints.”
ITS was forced to limit the number of people who could send mass e-mails. The list was first pared down to all faculty and staff. But even faculty and staff abused the power of mass e-mails, and the Reserved Students Digest finally assumed its current twice-a-day format in the fall semester of 2004. Downing described the people with the power to send messages as a “very short list.” It includes “heads of academic departments, the president and his staff, the head of public safety, one or two Facilities people, and Student Council.”
According to Downing, “for a number of years I’ve been saying that Reserved Students Digest is not a good solution for campus announcements… we all know that there are better longer term solutions, and we know the right answer is going to involve something with a portal.”
Why is Reserved Students Digest such a problem? Anybody who receives the messages can probably come up with their own reasons, but Student Council and the college administration have experienced the problem from the sending side. Since not everyone can send e-mails, students who want to publicize their event or ask about their lost cell phone have to get somebody else to forward their message.
According to Student Council President Joella Fink ’07, as soon as the Digest system was created “every administrative assistant would start getting dozens of e-mails.” Assistants had no way of knowing whether or not the messages they received had already been forwarded by another assistant or faculty member, and so frequently the same messages would appear in the same digest multiple times. “It was making the Digest unreadable,” said Fink,”so it was decided that there should be one person in charge in filtering through all of these e-mails and nobody wanted to be that person.”
The option of funding somebody to do the job was unavailable. As Downing said, the Digest “is an irritant… but it doesn’t rise to the level where I’m going to recommend that the college fund a position for it.”
Interim Director of Student Activities Kelly Wilcox pointed out that “while the reserved students highlights activities by students, very few are actually sponsored by the office of student activities.” She also stressed that when messages are sent in by an administrator, the message is associated with that administrators’ name. Administrators do not want to be associated with the joke e-mails and personal business advertisements that are sometimes sent through the Digest. Therefore, it was suggested that Student Council take over the responsibility.
At the end of the spring semester 2006, then-secretary of Student Council Rasa Petrauskatie ’08 volunteered to assume the responsibility on the understanding that it would be for a short period of time. According to Fink, once the Reserved Students Digest became a problem for only one person “the administration lost all urgency in creating some sort of an events calendar.”
Petrauskatie has been doing the job on a volunteer basis. She wrote in an e-mail that “I probably spend on average about 20 minutes a day on sending the messages.” She has to decide what messages she will forward on and what messages she will filter out. “I used to tell people who emailed me about relatively unimportant lost and found items to turn them in to public safety and not to post that in the digest,” but after members of SBC suggested that these sorts of items should be in the digest, “I have become more liberal about what sorts of messages I am willing to post.”
She’s been frustrated because “If a student really wants something to be posted for some reason, then how can the person who sends the messages objectively judge what’s important enough? Should a glass sale be advertised twenty times in the digest just because a student e-mails me about it twenty times? Right now that’s how the system works.” Petrauskatie thinks that “a better alternative would be to segregate the digest by category and to allow students to post messages themselves and then have at least one moderator have ability to remove inappropriate messages.” She could see this being done either through the Dashboard or through Facebook.
Student Council hopes to use their influence to create a new system, and as it turns out, ITS is currently in the early planning stages of a portal-based system that would replace the Reserved Students Digest. Downing wrote in a memo that “when print-based processes move on-line… communication becomes fractured; communication channels proliferate but none of them are comprehensive. This is certainly the case with events publicity. We’ve received an exceptionally large number of requests to provide better information about campus events.”
ITS wants to bring the communication channels back together to create a centralized system. They plan to consult with students this semester and launch a new events system at the beginning of Fall 2007.
Once the events are taken care of, ITS will have new goals to tackle. Kelly Mueller, Manager of Web Information Projects, explained that “what we really want is something that would function as a true information exchange space on the web… like an electronic bulletin board.” She said that “there are a number of initiatives trying to serve the community… the Gazette, Reserved Students Digest, and the Weekly News are all partial solutions, but we want a place where you can get everything.”
This portal would be able to have announcements, events, lost and found, requests for submissions to literary journals, and everything else you can imagine in a Reserved Students Digest. Downing’s memo described it as “a one stop shop for campus information tailored to the needs of specific audiences.”
The team plans to start soliciting student input on this communication system in Fall 2007 after the events system is implemented. Some of the things they are thinking of implementing are a categorization system like that suggested by Petrauskatie and an ability to search messages with keywords. Messages would also be archived for longer than they are with the Digest.
According to Downing, one problem with the idea of the portal is that “students would have to proactively go to that website to read that day’s messages… if you send an e-mail you know it’s getting to the person but if you post an announcement to a web page you can’t be as sure.” That said, Mueller pointed out that centralization would also aid the problem of student laziness. “If there was one place where everything went, everyone would feel more confident having advertised there.”