Nesletter Issue 6

Editorial | Summer School on Preservation | ELAG 2006 Workshop

DELOS Digital Library Manifesto | Multilinguality in the European Library

Summer School on Multimedia Digital Libraries | DELOS Researcher Exchange

TEL-DELOS Working Meeting on Multilinguality in the European Library

On 12 April 2006 colleagues from TEL and DELOS held a meeting with the aim of defining a workplan to produce a feasibility study to address the problems of multilinguality and suggest solutions, as well as producing mock-ups of output and user presentations. The participants at this meeting were Thomas Arni and Martin Braschler (ZHW), Nicola Ferro (U. Padua), Eric van der Meulen and Julie Verleyen (TEL), Carol Peters (ISTI-CNR) and Theo van Veen (KB/TEL). The meeting was organized within the frame of a larger cooperation between DELOS and TEL, whose foundation was laid during a Joint Meeting held in Paris last February.

The first part of the meeting consisted of presentations to explain the background and consider possible suggestions for implementation in TEL. An overview was also given of TEL architecture. Following these preliminary discussions, the second part of the meeting moved on to obtain a clear picture of the different aspects of multilinguality in terms both of what was possible and desirable to implement. The principal outcome of this discussion was the establishment of four options for further analysis:

• Browsing via multilingual thesauri - where users select keywords for searching from the thesaurus
• Isolated translation - where the system translates users’ queries
• Pseudo-translation - where users search in their own language but the records have been translated. (The focus will be on French-to-English and German-to-English, but additional languages may be considered.)
• Similar document search - where users select a document and can request similar documents. This will require full text or good abstracts. (Full text is not yet available in TEL.)

Simple user scenarios were described for each of the above options. While the technical implications might be very complicated, these user scenarios seemed to be quite simple as far as the user interface and user interaction were concerned. The intention is to produce mock-ups to clarify each stage. TEL will provide metadata samples.

From a TEL perspective, the first two options are most easily implemented given the existing architecture and current contents of TEL. TEL searches over multiple targets plus a central index. As regards the external targets, TEL can only control the query that is sent to the targets but not their contents. As far as the central index is concerned, the above options 2 and 3 might also be workable. 

This working meeting demonstrated that cooperation with DELOS can provide added value because it makes knowledge and experience from the research arena available to an operational service such as TEL. 

Theo van Veen, Netherland National Library 

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