Helplog messages

Frank Valdes wrote on Jan 06, 2005

Dear IRAF system and applications newsgroup and list subscribers,

You will have seen some messages label "helplog" and are now wondering why
this new activity.  The IRAF projects, which include organizations such
as NOAO, STScI, and Gemini, have help desks to aid users of their respective
IRAF applications.  It is easy to realize that the questions and answers
of user questions are potentially useful to all users provided they are
digested and made generally relevant.

The NOAO group receives thousands of questions a year and this amplifies by
three or four times with follow-ups and answers.  There is a lot of useful
information in this though much is redundant or not of wide generality.
Through the years We have thought about how to make the useful information
availabile to the community.  But this is made difficult by the limited
resources we have and by concerns over protecting the questioner's privacy.

We are experimenting with digesting the questions and answers as part of
the process of providing support to our users.  The digests which are
of wider use will be posted to the newsgroups and all digests will be
archived to form a valuable database for future search tools.  The success
of this ultimately rests in how diligent we, the NOAO IRAF support
group, are in digesting our mail since this is an extra bit of work for
us which comes out of our other projects.

We hope that you will find these mailings to be useful or at least
benign in volume.  If you find this valuable let us hear and tell others
to subscribe and if not feel free to unsubscribe from the lists.
Information about the ADASS/IRAF newsgroups may be found at

    http://iraf.noao.edu/adass_news.html

Yours,
Frank Valdes
NOAO/IRAF Group

---

Last post on Jan 06, 2005