Offrir Internet en bibliotheque publique (review)

Abstract

systems via a liaison dynamique. A guide to abbreviations is provided, since the French answer to American slang is acronyms—just as U.S. techspeak “hits a home run” too often for foreign speakers, so the French say, “The DLL decided the DRAC should adopt DSI for their ECM project at the ENSSIB . . .” To each culture its own linguistic weaknesses, then. Schools of information, computer science, and librarianship and any class involving the French or the French language will benefit from books like this. So will any program in cross-cultural studies and the “scaling up” of civilizations to our brave, new, fully globalized digital information world. All these disciplines will need some understanding of how we moved from the little American English-only public Internet, born in the U.S.A. in the early 1990s, to the global matrix backbone of digital information enmeshing so much of the world by the 2000s. How did it get here? How did it develop non-English languages and cultural patterns? The view from overseas is the key: that’s where the foreign users are, and this book shows how they see it.