Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!uunet!bionet!bionet-20.bio.net!Kristofferson
From: Kristofferson@BIONET-20.BIO.NET (David Kristofferson)
Newsgroups: bionet.sci-resources
Subject: Re: Status of Bionet Messages Received So Far
Message-ID: <12510780014.29.KRISTOFFERSON@BIONET-20.BIO.NET>
Date: 17 Jul 89 20:07:10 GMT
References: <8907131957.AA26735@net.bio.net>
Sender: kristoff@NET.BIO.NET
Lines: 26


> Response to my call for letters in support has been good, but not
> great.  Bionet has close to 3000 users.  Surely more than 72 people
> can write a note about the importance of Bionet for their work.
> (Those 72 notes have come from the US, Canada, the UK, Australia,
> Finland, and Korea.)  So far it's about 156,000 bytes of text.

BIONET has about 3000 registered users, but this number is simply the
total number of accounts on the system.  When a lab opens an account
the professor commonly signs up more people as users than actually
utilize the system.  In reality typically only one or two people in a
lab actively use the system.  The total number of labs (934 at the end
of last month) is a better indicator of our size.  The other fact is
that our logins are currently running only about half of the normal
rate during the vacation season.  Many labs typically will use BIONET
heavily when they need to analyze sequences (we average over 60
sequence database searches alone per day, not to mention all of the
other types of use on the system) and then they may not log back in
again for a couple of months after their project is done (since it's
"back to the bench" time).  If you take into account these factors
your response rate might be as high as about 1 in 7 which is pretty
decent considering the "silent majority" factor!

Dave Kristofferson

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