| Ever since 1988, RedIRIS (www.rediris.es) has developed into the foremost "Interconnection of Computer Resources" for nearly 250 Spanish universities and research centers. The services offered by RedIRIS to the Spanish academic and research community require a support infrastructure that is technologically adapted to the requirements of the connected centers. These services are provided in collaboration with other academic networks and international forums. The staff of RedIRIS specializes in communication technology and closely interacts with the affiliated institutions. They utilize L-Soft's LISTSERV® software for Unix to maintain numerous email lists and have done so since 1994.
"The administration of lists with LISTSERV is essential for RedIRIS and its academics and scientists," says Jesús Sanz de las Heras, Email Service Coordinator for RedIRIS. "LISTSERV is a simple and powerful tool that allows the interchange of information quickly and facilitates ongoing debate among researchers. Email lists meet a basic need for the coordination and management of services that RedIRIS provides."
OFER-TRABEC@LISTSERV.REDIRIS.ES is a RedIRIS announcement list that distributes job openings, scholarships and postgraduate coursework for the scientific community. This specialized list began seven years ago and now boasts over 15,000 subscriptions. It has a handsome customized Web interface and weekly archives that are easily searchable. OFER-TRABEC was inspired when Jesús Sanz de las Heras noticed that there were several job offers circulating on the university networks each day and that many were being disregarded as spam. He decided to take advantage of the powers of LISTSERV and created a distribution list so that these types of messages would be received quickly and succinctly. Furthermore, he uses the Topics function of the software to break down the messages into ten separate groups so that subscribers get only what is relevant to them. As time has gone by, more and more prestigious institutions have taken notice of OFER-TRABEC for the audience that it reaches on a daily basis.
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