Project Description

Managing the development and delivery of multilingual electronic library services is one of the major current challenges for making digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable. Digital libraries and OPAC-based traditional libraries are the most important source of reliable information used daily by scholars, researchers, and citizens to carry on their working (and leisure) activities. Facilitating access to multilingual document collections is an important way of supporting the dissemination of knowledge and cultural content.

CACAO offers an innovative approach to the problem of accessing, understanding and navigating multilingual textual content in digital libraries, enabling European users to better exploit the European electronic content at their disposal.

To address this challenge, CACAO proposes improved accessibility to the content of classical and digital libraries by guaranteeing cross-lingual and cross-border access to their data. The nature of the problem can be stated as follows: an analysis of the web logs accesses to the library catalogues of the partners of this project showed that, in a university context, such as that of a university library or a research library, about 40% of the queries are “duplicated” in at least two languages (usually in the local language and in English). In a library that is operating in a multicultural context, we observed that about 20% of the queries are written in three languages, namely Italian, German and English.
This situation creates a major barrier in accessing digital contents. Indeed:

Users waste a part of their time in typing the query again and again in different languages
In some cases the library content becomes simply inaccessible as the user is not aware of the fact that books about a certain topic are also available in other languages
When libraries have the possibility of acquiring content in a language other than the local one, they are faced with the following dilemma:
- Either they try to (roughly) solve the problem by classifying the incoming content according to separate classification hierarchies in different languages, which implies a substantial cost for the library;
- Or they just use the standard monolingual classification system, which implies hard accessibility to the content (at least 60% of the queries will not be in the same language as the one of the new content). This solution reduces the value of acquiring new content;
- Or they just limit as much as possible the acquisition of content in other languages, which implies narrowing the possibility of cross border mutual knowledge, as well as a cultural and scientific impoverishment of the library catalogue.
In a context of interlaced cross-border libraries, such as the one proposed by META OPAC, the absence of a cross-language perspective is likely to cause a substantial impasse: if a user wanted to access a META OPAC including the National Libraries of France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Hungary, s/he would have to type five queries in five different languages. Much of the advantage of having a unique access point is thus lost.

This issue will be solved by a system based on the following assumptions, which will be justified in the course of this project:

Users look more and more at library contents using free keyword queries (like those used with a web search engine) rather than more traditional library-oriented access (e.g. via Subject Heading).
Therefore, the only way to face the cross-language issue is by translating the query into all languages covered by the library/collection (rather than, for instance, translating subject headings).
As query translation is not a process users are familiar with, the consortium will deliver appropriate web-based interfaces to make this process transparent and unobtrusive. The interface might make use of advanced graphical devices, such as virtual reality and hyper-graph navigation.

The resulting system will return results in all desired languages.