Ever wondered about the origins of WAIN?

By Jessica Pietsch

Last week I met Peter Green at Murdoch’s Geoffrey Bolton Library. Starting out in my role as ALIA WA State Manager, many people had suggested I reach out to Peter, a pivotal ‘WA library leader’, partly because of his work in creating and maintaining the WAIN mailing list server that we all benefit so much from.

Peter started the list back in 1994 and maintained it in 1995 whilst he was working in Kalgoorlie, despite dial-up Internet being the only form of connection. Whilst we were together, Peter reflected on the primitiveness of the elist technology, surprisingly though emailhas persevered within our networked society.

It turns out that WAIN currently has over 2100 subscribers. Peter described his role as coordinator of the network as “a light touch…mostly people are extraordinarily sensitive and appropriate”, all subscribers start out moderated, then when they post something relevant to the LIS community, Peter changes their status to un-moderated.

You can subscribe to the Western Australian Information Network (WAIN) easily and for free, the list has three primary purposes:

To allow dissemination of information about events of interest to members of the library and information profession.
To discuss issues that are of interest to a broad cross section of the Profession.
To advertise positions that have become available.