Adding multilingual information access to the European library

Abstract

A feasibility study was conducted within the confines of the DELOS Network of Excellence with the aim of investigating possible approaches to extend The European Library (TEL) with multilingual information access, i.e. the ability to use queries in one language to retrieve items in different languages. TEL uses a loose coupling of different search systems, and deals with very short information items. We address these two characteristics with two different approaches: the "isolated query translation" approach, and the "pseudo-translated expanded records" approach. The former approach has been studied together with its implications on the user interface, while the latter approach has been evaluated using a test collection of over 150,000 records from the TEL central index. We find that both approaches address the specific characteristics of TEL well, and that there is considerable potential for a combination of the two alternatives. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.