get
coming to the NetGlos pages everyday is an excellent testimony to the success of
these types of working relationships. I see the future depending even more on
cooperative relationships -- although not necessarily on a volunteer basis."

3.4. Textual Databases

Let us take the example of two textual databases relating to the French language
-- the French FRANTEXT and the US-French ARTFL Project.

The FRANTEXT textual database has been available on the Web through subscription
since the beginning of 1995. It is prepared in France by the Institut national
de la langue francaise (INaLF) (National Institute of the French Language), a
section of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) (National
Center for Scientific Research). This interactive database includes 180 million
words resulting from the automatic processing of a collection of 3,500 texts in
arts, techniques and sciences, representing five centuries of literature
(16th-20th centuries).

At the beginning of 1998, 82 research centers and university libraries in
Europe, Australia, Canada and Japan were subscribing to FRANTEXT, with 1,250
work stations connected to the database, and about 50 questioning sessions per
day. The detailed results of the inquiry sent to FRANTEXT users in January 1998
are presented on the website by Arlette Attali.

In the future, Arlette Attali is thinking about "contributing to the development
of the linguistic tools associated to the FRANTEXT database and getting
teachers, researchers and students to know them." In her e-mail of June 11,
1998, she also explained the changes brought by the Internet in her professional
life:

"As I was more specially assigned to the development of textual databases at the
INaLF, I had to explore the websites giving access to electronic texts and test
them. I became a 'textual tourist' with the good and bad sides of this activity.
The tendency to go quickly from one link to another, and to skip through the
information, was a permanent danger -- it is necessary to target what you are
looking for if you don't want to lose your time. The use of the Web totally
changed my working methods -- my investigations are not only bookish and within
a narrow circle anymore, on the contrary they are expanding thanks to the
electronic texts available on the Internet."

The ARTFL Project (ARTFL: American and French Research on the Treasury of the
French Language) is a cooperative project establish