October 15, 2006 issue. This file presents an archive copy of the issue of the FYI France ejournal, ISSN 1071-5916, which was distributed via email on October 15, 2006.
Versions of the following have appeared online regularly, since 1992, as a feature of the FYI France ejournal, ISSN 1071-5916, which is distributed for free via email every month except August. Ejournal subscriptions may be obtained via email request to: kessler@well.sf.ca.us
Here this file is one of a number made available -- hopefully attractively, all in one place, and relevant to libraries and online digital information work in France and Europe -- as part of FYI France (sm)(tm), an online service to which anyone can subscribe for 12 months by postal mailing a check for US $45, payable to Jack Kessler, to PO Box 460668, San Francisco, California, USA 94146 (site licenses also are available): please write your email address on the front of your check. And you can pay via PayPal, on the FYI France homepage:
Please email suggestions for improvements to me at kessler@well.sf.ca.us
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Documents just installed online may be useful to anyone interested in the early history of the Internet for, a) the library profession in France, b) France generally, c) anyone anywhere outside of the Internet's very Anglo-American origins...
http://www.fyifrance.com/f102006e.htm
(versions in English and in French)
The first is a memo, composed by Hervé Le Crosnier in 1998, recalling the earliest years of BIBLIO-FR, the French librarians' econference -- still operating in 2006, only now with 14,000+ subscribers, up from the original 35... The second is Hervé's original minutes of the 1993 meeting which founded BIBLIO-FR.
It was a different Internet world, back then: a digital world already but one of ASCII-only, and "acceptable use policies", and "no public access", and "no commercial use" -- a photo of Hervé's own "Terminal VAX-VMS, telnet and ftp using a 9600bps modem and a VT220 screen", from the era, accompanies the article.
BIBLIO-FR's continuing survival and robust health offers proof that the Internet can "scale up" to international and multilingual applications; but it's been a long and rocky road...
Excerpts from Hervé's account:
>The Internet network was massively implanted throughout French universities via the birth of RENATER, in 1993. The users of the 1980's had been concentrated in the scientific disciplines, particularly those of physics, mathematics, and information science. The connectivity of RENATER allowed the network to reach other categories of university personnel. This first made possible the even more general idea of extending the network to other sectors of the population, within a few years.
>Librarians became the central elements in the "banalisation" of the Internet, and also the organizers of digital information, without anyone's imagining at the time how large the job would become -- this was before the birth of the "general public" Web, the launch of Mosaic not having taken place until the end of 1993...
>On reflection, it seems to me that one could not understand the excitement favoring the Internet without considering that sudden promotion of the "local" on the "global" scene. The famous Internet proverb, "act locally, think globally", for me took on an instant meaning. And without the new pleasures of multimedia communication I would not have found the energy necessary to fuel my own activities on the nets. It seems to me that an enthusiasm for technology continually is at work among the new generations of Internauts. The explosion of Internet activity also is the product of its ongoing reminder of the initial impression that at last one is not alone, that one has a voice equal to those of all the others in this multimedia scene.
>I also gauged the role of econference lists in education and professional training. Because I was not in love with bibliographic formats and cataloging, through reading several daily messages on the USMARC list I could follow the evolution of the profession's stance on digital libraries -- even though that term was not yet in use, at the time -- one spoke of virtual libraries, and of new frontiers in the abstract sense... or rather in the electronic sense. I heard talk, in my own offices, without participating myself in workgroups, of Z39.50 and the inter-operability of bibliographic systems, of the field of electronic resources, and of the incorporation of digital documents into library catalogs. This was an introduction which remains with me, as these subjects have emerged to become vital questions at the heart of the profession...
>The old interest which I had in digital publishing, which had spurred me to publish several texts on that theme, caused me to be contacted in April 1993 by Michel Melot, then the Président of the Conseil Supérieur des Bibliothèques. He had had the occasion to look at the Internet, during his travels and meetings with foreigners in the profession, and he wanted to assemble a working group to prepare the introduction of the network into France. Michel Melot, with his great personal modesty, long has adeptly recognized and summarized the most significant new developments in our profession.
>A meeting was held on May 28 at his offices, gathering together several persons interested in French libraries. To prepare for this meeting I drew up a list of about thirty people, by consulting the subscriber lists of US econferences. I sent each of them an informal message asking about the possibility of forming an "electronic discussion group" in France, and in French...
>...the role of a Moderator. As the minutes of the CSB meeting indicate, from the beginning the Moderator was seen as a technical facilitator for the communication: this was a task for which a paid position was envisaged... But in what, concretely, does "moderation" consist? We had to improvise. The provisional list was managed under an alias, in my personal email account. So for several months I worked as an "executive secretary", grouping together the messages and "presenting" them, in a sort of summary format. What appears naïve, in retrospect, was the initial idea of econference lists closer to commercial news reporting than to newsgroups. That remains, anyway, one image of BIBLIO-FR, one today difficult to modify...
>The BIBLIO-FR list became the first place of call for librarians new to the Internet. The ease of subscribing, then the daily receipt of specific messages, organized in a typology -- "questions", "responses", "announcements", "employment"... -- enabled a new subscriber to catch on quickly.
>But messages specifically concerning education did not make the grade -- nor did the launch of a "Foire aux Questions" (FAQ, Frequently Asked Questions), many times suggested but never successful...
>An informal questionnaire in September 1996... showed that the econference had come to be a means of verifying their [librarians and documentalists from small institutions] participation in their own profession: "Lists breach the solitude of the documentalist's life: through them one may become current with the latest debates, news, professional issues -- and all this in a forum less difficult than when one discusses these things with one's masters. If someone has a problem, she or he knows that it may be shown to the community, and in that bunch there doubtless will be someone who will know the answer, even if only a partial answer."...
>The large institutions maintained an ambivalent relationship with BIBLIO-FR, revealing the great rigidity in the French library profession. Instead of using the collective energy expressed in the list, for a long time the institutions viewed its existence as a danger, even if this attitude changed notably with the success of the "Rencontres de BIBLIO-FR" get-together in 1998 -- without, however, deciding to create their own channels for distribution and debate. Such paralysis, which cannot be found at all in the case of US lists, has negative effects on the collective use by the profession of projects, of other undertakings, and of experiences of value to the institutions...
> The Moderator generally performs four functions on an econference list: 1) Administrator, 2) Supervisor, 3) Mailroom Clerk, 4) Mediator...
_________________
Other econference Moderators will smile knowingly... Le Crosnier devoted years to refining this Moderator role, succeeded since 2000 by BIBLIO-FR's very able current Moderator, Sara Aubry...
Editor's Note:
The Internet needs to know its own history, as do its critics. In today's debates, over "Googlization" and "anti-Terrorism measures" and "Chinese and other government restrictions", we all need to understand how all of this began, in order to understand where it is now and where it may be headed.
There is a track record, here: one not without blemishes, and one already old enough to exhibit clear directions stemming from its very origins. If we don't understand all of this -- if we don't at least make the attempt to understand it -- we are flying blind... as some critics now say that we are...
So some study of "the early days", by those now on the cutting / bleeding edge of where digital information currently is headed, may help. Before we plunge forward further, then, with --
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/documentary_archive/4791315.stm
http://www.thechangingworld.org/archives/wk41.php
-- or,
-- it might be good to go back to first principles, and recall why we started out with "digital information" in the first place. Not that goals and techniques do not and should not change... but at least we ought to know what they are, and remember what they were, and pause to consider why those changes may have occurred.
BIBLIO-FR -- http://listes.cru.fr/sympa/info/biblio-fr -- has been since its 1993 establishment, and continues to be, the best single place to investigate and appreciate the role of librarians in France online. In addition, though, BIBLIO-FR dramatically illustrates two more general subjects: the introduction of the Internet into France, and the scaling-up of the Internet to international and trans-national applications in a non-anglophone world. In all three arenas the path has not been smooth, although it has been immensely useful and productive: via BIBLIO-FR -- its invaluable online archive as well as its ongoing discussions -- any researcher anywhere can come to appreciate the details of why, over time, this has been so.
Of course for BIBLIO-FR's archive you have to be able to read French... But that is one central point of scaling-up: if the international and trans-national customers do not use English, then the Internet has to learn the languages the customers prefer, not the other way around...
Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com
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FYI France (sm)(tm) e-journal ISSN 1071-5916
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