about his work as a webmaster: "The main
aim of the Pasteur Institute Library website is to serve the Institute
itself and its associated bodies. It supports applications that have
become essential in such a big organization: bibliographic databases,
cataloguing, ordering of documents and of course access to online
periodicals (presently more than 100). It is also a window for our
different departments, at the Institute but also elsewhere in France
and abroad. It plays a big part in documentation exchanges with the
institutes in the worldwide Pasteur network. I am trying to make it an
interlink adapted to our needs for exploration and use of the internet.
The website has existed in its present form since 1996 and its audience
is steadily increasing. I build and maintain the web pages and monitor
them regularly. I am also responsible for training users, which you can
see from my pages. The web is an excellent place for training and is
included in most ongoing discussions about training."

What about the future of librarians? "Our relationship with both the
information and the users is what changes. We are increasingly becoming
mediators, and perhaps to a lesser extent 'curators'. My present
activity is typical of this new situation: I am working to provide
quick access to information and to create effective means of
communication, but I also train people to use these new tools. I think
the future of our job is tied to cooperation and use of common
resources. It is certainly an old project, but it is really the first
time we have had the means to set it up."

1998: MULTILINGUAL WEB

[Overview]

In 1998, Randy Hobler was a consultant in internet marketing for
Globalink, a company specializing in language translation software and
services. Randy wrote in September 1998: "85% of the content of the web
in 1998 is in English and going down. This trend is driven not only by
more websites and users in non-English-speaking countries, but by
increasing localization of company and organization sites, and
increasing use of machine translation to/from various languages to
translate websites. (...) Because the internet has no national
boundaries, the organization of users is bounded by other criteria
driven by the medium itself. In terms of multilingualism, you have
virtual communities, for example, of what I call 'Language Nations'...
all those people on the internet wherever they may be, for whom a given
language is their