A few random thoughts/statistics about the FML archives at CUNYVM:
 
Regarding the question about making the FML archives searchable, I agree
with Chris on most points.  I think whatever might be implemented should
be of reasonably high quality.
 
The archives out of CUNYVM have been very active lately.  Over 3000 articles
have been sent out in the last month or so, which brings the total number of
articles processed since the creation of the archives to about 8000!
 
Some time ago I mentioned that we're considering making the issues available
via Gopher or the World Wide Web, but there has been no progress with that.
If nobody else does it first, I still plan to do it, but the resources (both
people time and hardware) just aren't available now.
 
Actually the server here *can* do searches, but I dare not turn it on for the
FML since it methods used for searching are somewhat primitive and rather
expensive.  I occasionally do searches upon request with another program.
 
By the way, in uncompressed form, with the FML issues stored in 4K blocks,
the archives here take up 12 meg of disk space.
 
Bill
 
[Posted in FML issue 0796]