Enabling Multilingual Access in Digital Libraries Miguel E. Ruiz (Organizer & Moderator) University of North Texas, School of Library and Information Sciences. P.O. Box 311068. Denton, TX 76203-1068. Email: meruiz@unt.edu Jiangping Chen (Organizer & Moderator) University of North Texas, School of Library and Information Sciences. P.O. Box 311068. Denton, TX 76203-1068. Email: jpchen@unt.edu Douglas Oard University of Maryland, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, Room 4105 Hornbake Bldg, South Wing, College Park, MD 20742 Email: oard@umd.edu Noriko Kando National Institutes of Informatics (NII), 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8430, Japan. Email: kando@nii.ac.jp Carol Peters Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione, Italian National Research Council, Area della Ricerca CNR, Via Moruzzi, 1 - 56124 Pisa, Italy Email: carol.peters@isti.cnr.it Allison Druin University of Maryland, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, Room 4105 Hornbake Bldg, South Wing, College Park, MD 20742 Email: allisond@umiacs.umd.edu Sponsors: SIG/DL and SIG/III This panel aims to promote the application of Multi Lingual Information Access (MLIA) technologies in digital libraries. MLIA has been recognized as an important issue for digital libraries since the early days of research and development of these projects. This panel will give an overview of the issues involved in creating MLIA for digital Libraries. The speakers will present the state-of-the-art of MLIA technologies as well as current digital library projects in Europe, Asia and North America that are planning or have implemented MLIA technologies. The focus of the panel will include discussions on important issues and challenges of implementing MLIA in digital libraries such as understating users’ needs, usability issues and users’ expectations. Overview There has been an awareness of the importance of enabling multilingual access to the digital collections since the early days of research and development of digital libraries. On one hand, we have contents that have been created in more than one language. On the other hand, the world wide

phenomenon of increasing access to internet has created a large user population that includes users with very diverse languages and cultural background (Oard, 1997). However, very few digital library projects have been offering multilingual support for storage, organization and access of their collections. Multi Lingual Information Access (MLIA) includes more than just cross lingual access but rather a broader problem “helping users to search, browse, recognize and use information (rather than documents) from (possibly interlinked) sets of multilingual, multimedia information objects” (Gonzalo & Peters, 2003).. These multilingual interfaces provide opportunity for users to directly access previously unavailable sources of information. To enable information access across languages, researchers have been working diligently exploring effective algorithms and related technologies for more than ten years. Many Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) projects have been funded by government agencies and many MLIA technologies have been explored and evaluated. Now it’s time to apply appropriate MLIA technologies to real-world information systems such as digital libraries. This panel aims to promote the application of MLIA technologies in digital libraries. The speakers will introduce the state-of-the-art MLIA technologies to the audience. Also, they will report current digital library projects worldwide that are planning or implementing MLIA technologies. The focus of the panel will be discussions on important issues and challenges of implementing MLIA in digital libraries such as understating users and designing the MLIA function for the users. The summary of each speaker’s presentation is provided below. Douglas Oard will provide a general overview of MLIA, including evolution and state-of-the-art technologies, and recent research and development. Carol Peters will talk about the TrebleCLEF project that has been funded by the European Union. The main goal of the project is to provide European DL projects with guidelines on how to implement MLIA functionality. She will explain the importance of the project for the European Commission, what the issues are, and what TrebleCLEF is doing to promote technological transfer and to help DL developers to include a MLIA component. Nariko Kando will discuss MLIA research and practice for Asian languages, in particular Chinese, Japanese and Korean and will give an overview of particular issues faced when dealing with these languages. Allison Druin will give an overview of user interaction issues related to multilingual access and digital libraries in general. She will also present specific examples from her research team’s experiences using the International Children’s Digital Library (www.childrenslibrary.org) with children, librarians, teachers, and parents in such countries as Mongolia, Honduras, New Zealand, and Germany (Druin et al., 2007). To promote discussion about this topic the organizers are planning to elicit questions and comments from ASIST members using the ASIST & SIG/DL distribution lists, wiki and a blog before the conference. These questions and comments will be collected, organized and presented to the panel and audience to encourage discussion during the Q&A session.

Bibliography Druin, A., Weeks, A., Massey, S., & Bederson, B. B. (2007). Children’s interests and concerns when using the International Children’s Digital Library: A four country case study. In Proceedings of Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL’2007) Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 167-176. Gonzalo, J. and Peters, C. (2004) Comparative evaluation of multilingual information access systems: 4th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2003, Trondheim, Norway, August 2003, Revised Papers. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer; Berlin. Pages 1-6 Oard, D. (1997) Serving users in many languages. D-Lib Magazine, December 1997. Peters, C and Braschler, M. (2001). Cross-language system evaluation: The CLEF campaigns. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52(12), 1067-1072.