Network Update

Abstract

We hear daily reports of exponential growth in Internet use worldwide, but what do these reports mean? More importantly, what is happening in our corner of the world? Are language professionals taking advantage of the new possibilities in electronic communication? I undertook to find out how those who are already on-line and using language discussion lists for professional communication were using some of the information retrieval facilities that are available. Working backward from there, I made some inferences about general Internet use by language professionals. Some of us are making decisions as the designers of online resources, as technology trainers for our faculty, or simply as users of the Internet. What services can we use or should we be asking our system operators to provide for us and to our faculty? If we need to choose one of these retrieval methods for information and content storage, which wou ld more of our colleagues be likely to use?