LTSN
Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics, and Area Studies
About the Internet Resources Collection
| History | Collection Maintainers | Site Selection | Representation | Rating | The Final Word |
History
This collection has grown from some 20 sites on a single sheet of A4 paper back in 1995 to over 800 sites at the time of writing (Feb 2002), mirroring the exponential expansion of the Internet and WWW since 1995. Back in those days, we were debating whether or not it was worth having a website at all as the number of sites on the WWW was so small, and we never foresaw that the number of sites on the WWW would mushroom in such spectacular fashion. Hence, the list had no planned structure and was initially just a single web page.
Since that time, the growth of the list has been ad hoc, with categories added and amended continuously as the need arose in order to make it more manageable, consistent, and easier to use by our target audience. The structure of the collection has essentially evolved, rather than having been planned. It may not be the optimum structure for this type of collection, and were we to start anew in these days when there are hundreds of millions of websites we would certainly do things very differently (the collection would be implemented as a database, for a start), but that's how it's grown up.
Collection Maintainers
From 1995 until late 2001, the sole maintainer of the list was Fred Riley. Fred is an IT technician and language learner, whose main expertise is in programming and website development. Fred's experience in languages is as a learner, mainly of Italian which he has been studying since 1993, and as a developer of computer-aided language learning (CALL) software in collaboration with language teachers.
In the winter of 2001, Janet Bartle became joint maintainer of the collection. Janet has a Bachelors degree in French and Spanish and a Masters degree in Applied Language and New Technologies gained at the University of Hull. She has worked as a researcher evaluating distance education via videoconferencing and taught EFL in France and Spain, French in the UK and also taught on the same MA in Applied Language and New Technologies at Hull.
Site selection
Selecting which sites to go into the collection has been ad hoc from the start, although various loose selection criteria have evolved as time progressed. In the early days of the collection, Fred actively searched for language sites (of which there were precious few in 1995/6) to add. As the collection has snowballed it has acquired its own momentum, and now more time is spent evaluating sites submitted to the maintainers than in actively seeking out new resources, although this does still take place.
Selection criteria
There's no rigorous selection schema, but instead loose criteria which have evolved over time. The main criterion for inclusion in the non-Commercial sections is:
Does the site contain freely-available resources which would be of use to language teachers and/or learners in university education?
This is because our target audience, whom we're paid to serve, are participants in the UK Higher Education sector. If a commercial site contains a significant amount of freely-available language resources then it will be listed in the main part of the collection, otherwise it will be placed in the Commercial category.
Other loose evaluation criteria are:
- Is the website usable and well-designed?
- Is the site usable by all browsers?
- Does the site contain resources which are available elsewhere?
And so on. As can be seen from the collection, though, some sites don't necessarily fulfil all, or even any, of these criteria: they were added on personal whim simply because it seemed like a good idea at the time :)
Representation
The personal interests, experience, and expertise of the list maintainers, not to mention our workload, means that the collection is necessarily biassed and highly unrepresentative of the enormous range of world languages. Because we both speak and study Romance languages there is a definite over-preponderance of such sites, particularly in the Italian, Hispanic, and French categories. The collection is also very Eurocentric.
The collection is not, and never has been, intended to be at all representative of world languages, their geographical spread, and the number of their speakers. For example, we have a longer listing of sites for Gaelic languages, spoken by perhaps 200,000 people, than we do of Oriental languages, spoken by hundreds of millions of people. This is not any sort of snub to speakers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc, but simply a direct reflection of our personal interests and expertise.
Neither do we take any political or moral stance on the status of languages, or on the vexed and often highly contentious question of whether a tongue is a language or a dialect.
Redressing the balance
Although the collection is inevitably skewed and biassed, we do make efforts to seek out sites for non-Romance and non-European languages, often by co-opting colleagues who are expert in these languages to submit sites to us to evaluate. We actively welcome submissions from users, especially for those categories in the collection which are particularly 'thin'.
Rating
We do not rate sites, as this would be invidious, inaccurate, and highly inappropriate. Sites that we have been especially impressed with have "recommended" appended to their descriptions, but that's it.
The Final Word
In the end, the essential fact of this collection is that it's been put together as we go along, without any original plan or design, by people who've added sites they like the look of. Users should remember this and not judge us, or our work, too harshly. We are only human.