Dominance of English fading?

A visit to Berlin in the New Year gave me an outsider's perspective on German-language developments in the Internet arena. Internet usage has been slower to take off in Germany than in the UK, for various reasons. These include factors to do with telecommunications, for example the less liberal market, and ? in some parts of the former East Germany ? the continuing difficulty of getting an ordinary phone hooked up quickly. There is also the fact that as the major credit cards are less widely used, many people simply cannot sign up with US-based consumer online services.

The amount of German-language Internet content is, nevertheless, growing swiftly. In fact, IDC Research has recently predicted in its report, The Emerging European Internet Access Market, that Germany will be the biggest Internet user in Europe by the year 2000. Online banking is currently being pushed, and most German Internet magazines seemed to contain an insert for BANK 24, an Internet banking service which is a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank.

Use of the Internet is a hot discussion topic amongst librarians, although German university libraries, which tend to be rather more traditional than their British counterparts, do not seem to have plunged into virtuality with the same fervour as their colleagues in some other countries. There is a useful collection of links to German library sites on the Internet at: http://www.hbz-nrw.de/hbz/

Some of the big US search engines are now offering national versions of their products. The German-language Lycos and Alta Vista look rather limited (basically reliant on adding a set of German-language navigation pages and searching on specific country addresses ? thus missing out German companies which have registered .com addresses).

German Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.de/) seems more promising and has the big advantage of having real human beings making the decision as to whether a particular site is relevant or not. There are also indigenous search guides, for example Web.de (http://web.de/, which links with Lycos) or Aladin (http://www.aladin.de/). A list of search engines is given in one of the German Internet magazines, Internet Aktuell. This, incidentally, is one of the best-value Internet magazines I've come across, costing only DM 2.20 (just under £1) for each informative issue.

Berlin's newspapers have developed their own sites, and all have free access to the day's news stories. The Berliner Morgenpost (http://www.berliner-morgenpost.de/ ) also has a good day-by-day 'what's on' guide, whilst Der Tagesspiegel (http://www.tagesspiegel.de/) has developed its advertising section ? notably jobs and accommodation. At http://www.BerlinOnline.de/ there is an archive of the Berliner Zeitung with text going back to 1994 and photos from the last few months. At present there are fewer than 300 photos, but the collection is growing.

In print, the Morgenpost has its 'bits and bytes' section on Sundays, and the Tagesspiegel goes 'Interactiv' on Wednesday. 'Taz' (der Tageszeitung, http://www.taz.de/) has an Internet focus every Thursday. All of these papers include these sections in their online versions.

In conversation with a German librarian, the point was made that to get the most out of the Internet, you didn't just have to understand English, you had to understand it well (I perceive a market for courses in 'Internet American'). There is already much useful German content to counteract this, and it is growing by the day.

Modem blues

There have been many 'how I found it hard to connect to the Internet' stories, and I would not wish to bore IWR readers by adding to them. However, this Christmas made me appreciate how fortunate I am in my workplace: I have the double blessing of an Apple Mac and an academic network connection.

I was given a modem for Christmas. Being given a modem has something in common with being given a Rolls Royce or a large pedigree dog: one is overwhelmed not only with the generosity of the giver and the beauty of the gift, but also the immensity of its future maintenance costs.

Of course, a modem doesn't necessarily oblige one to spend money. The (Hayes) modem installed without trouble and worked perfectly. But what's the point of a modem if you're not going to do Internet and e-mail? Since the machine was a newish PC with Windows 95, we thought that Microsoft Network (MSN) might be the easiest solution. Big mistake. The MSN wanted us to download the Internet Explorer browser even though it looked like the same version we'd already got, and kept insisting that we didn't have relevant bits of Microsoft software installed ? bits that were most certainly up and running.

The e-mail did not seem to work at all to begin with, and, like most of the service, was not properly explained. The most annoying thing about the whole business was the way those cheerful 'MSN is so easy!' messages greeted you at every turn in your (vain) search for some decent instructions. (The second most annoying thing was the way that my husband kept saying, 'but aren't you supposed to be an Internet expert?')

Fortunately (or unfortunately, in the light of future phone bills) it all seemed to work in the end. Because of the unlimited use of the Internet that you get in your monthly fee ? the major advantage over CompuServe at time of writing - we will stay with MSN for a while. However, if I was starting from scratch I would be more likely to try to connect to AOL or CompuServe first, since I'm not sure that they would have been any trickier to set up.

Sheila Webber is Lecturer at the Department of Information Science, University of Strathclyde, and Editor of the IIS newsletter Inform.