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About the Internet Resources Collection
HistoryThis collection has grown from some 20 sites on a single sheet of A4 paper back in 1995 to over 1000 sites at the time of writing (September 2006), mirroring the exponential expansion of the Internet and WWW since 1995. Back in those days, we in the CTI Centre for Modern Languages 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 MaintainersFrom 1995 until late 2001, the sole maintainer of the list was myself, Fred Riley. I'm an IT technician and language learner, and my main expertise is in programming, database design and website development. My experience in languages is as a learner, mainly of Italian which I've 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. At the end of 2002 Janet left the university, and I was made redundant and, regrettably, no longer work in the field of languages, although I do keep a connection alive by maintaining the EUROCALL website. This list is now solely maintained by myself on a private hosting account, and no longer has any connection with the university. Site selectionSelecting 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, I 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 me than in actively seeking out new resources, although this does still take place. Selection criteriaThere's no rigorous selection schema, but instead loose criteria which have evolved over time. The main criterion for inclusion is:
This is because the target audience is primarily teachers and students in the UK Higher Education sector. Other loose evaluation criteria are:
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 :) Commercial sitesThis is an amateur collection of links, not a commercial advertising site, and as it's only maintained in my spare time I'm increasingly picky as to what goes in it, as it takes time to evaluate sites. There are thousands of commercial languages sites, selling products and services. When, in the past, I included a Commercial section in the site, I was flooded with cut & paste requests addressed to "Dear Webmaster", and spent increasing amounts of my time evaluating sites which offered little or no freely-available resources, such that the majority of link requests I was getting were from commercial sites seeking free advertising. Moreover, analysis of this site's accesses showed that the Commercial page was little-used, and I figured that I was spending too much time keeping a listing which was of little or no service to this site's users. So, from 10/9/06, I decided to drop the commercial sites listing (still available in archive), and to no longer list any commercial site which does not fulfil the main criterion above, that is to provide a significant amount of high-quality free material for learners and/or teachers. That means more than just a few sample lessons in beginner's French. (An example of a quality commercial site providing a good resource is Garzanti Linguistica, which provides excellent online Italian and Italian <-> English dictionaries for free, whilst at the same time selling its products.) If you're a representative of a commercial site and the site only sells products/services, please do not email me requesting its inclusion in this list, as your email will be dropped into the 'memory hole'. If your site does have meaningful free resources, it will be considered for inclusion. 'Exchanging' linksI never 'exchange' links with anyone or any body. If you want to link to this site then fine, just do so, and if I find a site worth linking to then I'll do so without asking - it's (still just) a free Web, after all. AdvertisingI do not, and will never, accept any form of advertising on this site. Not only do I not need the pathetic amounts of money such ads bring in, but carrying advertising would place reasonable doubts in the mind of site users as to my independence and willingness to evaluate sites as honestly as I can. Languages RepresentationThe personal interests, experience, and expertise of the list maintainers, both past and present, not to mention available time, means that the collection is necessarily biassed and highly unrepresentative of the enormous range of world languages. Because I speak and study Italian, French, Spanish and Scottish Gaelic, 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, it contains a far longer listing of sites for Gaelic languages, spoken by perhaps 200,000 people scattered across the fringes of Europe, than it does of Oriental languages, spoken by hundreds of millions of people throughout Asia. This is not any sort of snub to speakers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc, but simply a direct reflection of the personal interests and expertise of myself and Janet. Neither do I 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 balanceAlthough the collection is inevitably skewed and biassed, I do make efforts to seek out sites for non-Romance and non-European languages. I actively welcome submissions from users, especially for those categories in the collection which are particularly 'thin'. RatingI do not rate sites, as this would be invidious, inaccurate, and highly inappropriate. Sites that I've been especially impressed with have "recommended" appended to their descriptions, but that's it. The Final WordIn the end, the essential fact of this collection is that it's been put together ad hoc, 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.
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