A Subject gateway in Multiple Languages: A Prototype Development and Lessons Learned

Abstract

The Internet has a lot of rich information resources available in different languages aside from English, the major language of use. Those resources are, however, not easy to access because of language barriers. This paper proposes a collaborative model to develop a multilingual subject gateway, which is called the Internet Public Library Asia (IPL-Asia). It describes how IPLAsia was conceived and developed, and some lessons learned from the experience. IPL-Asia is a subject gateway which collects high quality Internet resources expressed in Chinese, Japanese, Korean languages, and provides information about those resources in those three languages and English. This paper shows the metadata schema and an implementation of IPL-Asia. The schema is defined based on Dublin Core and IEEE LOM with some extensions for multilingual description. Criteria for selecting quality resources on the Internet were also defined. A metadata record is collaboratively described in multiple languages by catalogers whose mother languages are different. A metadata record is encoded in XML. Metadata records are stored and displayed using XML technologies, e.g., XSLT and XML database. This system provides user interfaces in multiple languages.