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This study aims to understand the technical and operational challenges encountered by multilingual digital libraries and their strategies to solve problems in sustaining multilinguality services for digital libraries.

Using the multiple-case method, this study investigated two digital libraries that have sustained multilinguality for over a decade: the World Digital Library and the Digital Library of the Caribbean.

This study identified eight factors that contributed to the success of the two multilingual digital libraries and eight technical and operational challenges they have faced. A framework for digital libraries to sustain multilinguality is proposed. This framework illustrates the challenges and strategies to address the challenges in 11 aspects: creation, leadership, collaboration, content, metadata, translation, funding, technology, preservation, staffing and copyright.

This study focused on two multilingual digital libraries administered in the USA, though they do not fully represent multilingual digital libraries in the USA. Therefore, the findings from the study may not apply to multilingual digital libraries the USA or other countries. As on-site interviews of both digital libraries were conducted at the beginning of 2019, the timeframe of this study is up to that date.

With more users worldwide seeking information online, more digital libraries will be providing multilingual services. This study provides guidelines to digital library developers and archivists for building and sustaining their digital libraries or archives. The experience and lessons learned from these two digital libraries may also help to better understand challenges and use effective strategies in building and sustaining multilinguality.

The users and communities of digital libraries will be able to learn the benefits and challenges as related to building and sustaining digital library services. These services always need support to better serve their users and communities.

As the first multiple-case research that investigates in-depth challenges and approaches of digital libraries in sustaining multilinguality, this study presents a general picture of how the two digital libraries have succeeded in sustaining multilinguality. Theoretically, the study enriches the literature by providing a more comprehensive sustainability framework for multilinguality. This framework specifies possible aspects to consider for gaining sustainability of multilingual digital libraries and offers useful guidelines and insights for the digital library community to build multilingual services.

This study aims to survey academic users in order to identify their needs and expectations about multilingual information processing when they interact with digital libraries. The study specifically aims to determine the disparities in needs and expectations when users speak different languages.

A survey was designed to fill in the gaps in the knowledge about academic users' multilingual needs and expectations for digital libraries. The survey questionnaire incorporates questions about different aspects of the participants' multilingual needs and expectations covering multilingual needs, the multilingual behavior, often‐used multilingual information resources, and desired functions for the multilingual services, retrieval and interfaces in digital libraries. The results are obtained through statistical analyses and clustering methods.

Overall, participants exhibited many multilingual needs during their academic activities. They often require multilingual information when they access academic databases or web information. Frequently, participants use online translation resources and tools, but they are not satisfied with the translation quality. Participants want many multilingual capabilities in digital libraries; they also want more sophisticated multilingual search interfaces. However, participants from different countries or who speak different languages show significant differences in their multilingual needs and expectations of digital libraries. This study's three user groups demonstrated clear differences in all aspects of multilinguality examined, as did the three latent groups identified through the clustering methods.

Few studies have examined the multilingual information process in digital libraries from the point of view of academic users. This study draws its inputs directly from real academic users from different countries and provides insights into multilinguality in digital libraries.

This study aims to understand key features of existing multilingual digital libraries and to suggest strategies for building and/or sustaining multilingual information access for digital libraries.

A case study approach was applied to examine four American multilingual digital libraries: Project Gutenberg, Meeting of Frontiers, The International Children's Digital Library, and the Latin American Open Archives Portal. This examination used a framework derived from digital library evaluation practice. The missions, goals, funding, partners, users, collections, services, and technologies of these digital libraries were analyzed to present their key multilingual features. The collaboration and crowdsourcing characteristics were highlighted and discussed.

These four multilingual libraries benefit substantially, both in the creation of the library and in its access, from the collaboration of groups domestic and international with different language expertise. For building the multilingual collection and services, some libraries involved both staff and users. For multilingual access to the collection, however, none of the libraries used machine translation or cross‐language information retrieval technologies.

The four cases are all publicly available digital libraries in the USA. Their features may not be applicable to digital libraries in other countries or to commercial digital information services.

With the advancement of machine translation technologies and the wide application of social media, multilingual digital libraries may have even better opportunities to sustain their multilingual capabilities through crowdsourcing and the application of new technologies.

This study summarizes the key features of four existing multilingual digital libraries. It provides insights into important factors for building successful multilingual digital libraries. The suggested strategies may help digital library developers to design appropriate multilingual information access services.

Together, increasing globalization and the internet created fertile grounds for the establishment of multilingual digital libraries. Providing cross‐lingual access to materials is of particular interest to political entities such as the European Union, which currently has 23 official languages, but also to multinational companies and countries that have different languages represented among their citizens. The main objective of this paper is to review the literature on multilingual digital libraries and provide an overview of this area.

Based on a thorough literature search in four different databases, a core set of literature on multilingual digital libraries was retrieved. Literature on various aspects of this topic was reviewed. The paper is organized based on emerging themes directly drawn from the literature. Where warranted additional literature is brought in to provide necessary background information or clarification.

Creating a multilingual digital library is a highly complex undertaking and typically requires a collaborative effort between different organizations and people with different areas of expertise. Enabling users to search across languages requires translation resources to cross the language barrier, which can be challenging depending on the language and resource availability. Additional challenges were found to be in data management (localization and language processing), representation (dealing with different fonts and character codes), development (creating international software, cross‐cultural collaboration), and interoperability (system architecture and data sharing). Research in multilingual digital libraries was mostly system based involving experimental systems or system prototypes.

Most likely the literature review does not include all possible journal articles on multilingual digital libraries even though the literature searches done to obtain these articles were thorough and deliberate. Journal articles without the descriptors used in this search and those articles not indexed in the four different databases used in the search will not be included here. The review excludes cross‐language information retrieval research unless it is directly related to existing multilingual digital libraries, or a connection to digital libraries in general is made in the paper itself.

This paper provides the first literature review on the topic of multilingual digital libraries and provides a concise overview of relevant aspects in this area. The number of multilingual digital libraries is growing, as is the interest from the research community in these libraries to apply their research findings from cross‐language information retrieval. This review article provides a valuable entry point to the field of multilingual digital libraries for researchers, practitioners, and other interested parties.

The purpose of this paper is to explore multilingual access in digital libraries and to present a case study of creating bilingual metadata records for the Tse-Tsung Chow Collection of Chinese Scrolls and Fan Paintings. The project, undertaken at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, provides access to digital copies of calligraphic and painted Chinese scrolls and fans from the collection donated by Prof Tse-Tsung Chow (Cezong Zhou).

This paper examines the current approaches to multilingual indexing and retrieval in digital collections and presents a model of creating bilingual parallel records that combines translation with controlled vocabulary mapping.

Creating multilingual metadata records for cultural heritage materials is in an early phase of development. Bilingual metadata created through human translation and controlled vocabulary mapping represents one of the approaches to multilingual access in digital libraries. Multilingual indexing of collections of international origin addresses the linguistic needs of the target audience, connects the digitized objects to their respective cultures and contributes to richer descriptive records. The approach that relies on human translation and research can be undertaken in small-scale digitization projects of rare cultural heritage materials. Language and subject expertise are required to create bilingual metadata records.

This paper presents the results of a case study. The approach to multilingual access that involves research, and it relies on human translation that can only be undertaken in small-scale projects.

This case study of creating parallel records with a combination of translation and vocabulary mapping can be useful for designing similar bilingual digital collections.

This paper also discusses the obligations of holding institutions in undertaking digital conversion of the cultural heritage materials that originated in other countries, especially in regard to providing metadata records that reflect the language of the originating community.

The research and practice in multilingual indexing of cultural heritage materials are very limited. There are no standardized models of how to approach building multilingual digital collections. This case study presents a model of providing bilingual access and enhancing the intellectual control of cultural heritage collections.

Less attention has been paid to users’ interactions and behavior in studying multilingual search. Although digital library researchers have yet to assess user interaction and behavior in multilingual search, they have concurred that there is a need for user studies that document the extent to which information retrieval systems meet multilingual users’ needs and expectations. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This study is composed of five individual cases. The case study participants were Saudi students enrolled either at a large state university or Historically Black College and University located in the same community. Research questions are, what do Saudi Digital Library (SDL) users experience when searching within the SDL in Arabic and English? And what strategies do they use if they fail to find resources? Data collected for this study were via a qualitative method called video-stimulated recall.

In the Arabic search tasks, participants realized that finding resources is not easy. Participants expressed their concerns about the lack of relevance and accuracy of results returned by the search system, indicating weak trust and confidence in the search system. Whereas in the English search task, participants felt more satisfied and confident in their ability to trust the results returned from the search system. Participants expressed their satisfaction in the search experience as it provided them with accurate and varying resources. The participants faced difficulties finding Arabic resources than English resources in the SDL.

This study is considered one of the earliest works in studying the information-seeking behavior of multilingual digital libraries in the Arabic language. The value of this study arises as being the first study to investigate and report the information-seeking behavior of SDL users.

Building multilingual resources and providing multilingual services have always been important tasks for Chinese academic libraries, but they are also the difficult issues that the libraries are facing. In this chapter, we present a survey conducted on six different academic libraries for collecting data on multilingual resource building, on the usages of the multilingual resources and on multilingual services. Each of our survey to an academic library consisted of four interviews to the library administrator and the librarians of the book, periodical and database departments. Our goal in this chapter is to examine multilingual resources and services in academic libraries in China. The study results confirm several conclusions from the literature about multilingual resources and services in Chinese academic libraries, and at the same time, the results also reveal original insights on possible strategic decision on focusing on multilingual databases and books, and on the problem of lacking adoption of translation-based technologies such as cross-language information access and machine translation in improving the usages of multilingual collections and services.

This review aims to provide a snapshot of digital library research of the past 11 years (1997‐2007) that focuses on organisational and people issues, including those concerning the social/cultural, legal, ethical, and use dimensions.

The review covers articles published in mainstream peer‐reviewed library and information science/studies journals. The analysis was done by drawing on a sample of 577 articles published in both academic and professional LIS journals.

The analysis reveals that there are several topics that are dominant in the sample. There are significant research streams into one or more aspects of digital library use and usability, organisational and economical issues, as well as legal issues. In comparison, there is very little research in the sample that addresses ethical issues and social/cultural issues. D‐Lib Magazine tops the list as the journal with the highest number of articles published and in spite of some fluctuations, there was an overall upwards trend for journal publications in these research areas. The years with the largest numbers of works published in these areas in the study sample were 2004, 2005 and 2006.

It would be inaccurate to claim that the literature searches conducted in this study include every relevant journal article. They provide an extensive but not comprehensive sample. Also, to account for inconsistencies in indexing, a range of descriptors related to “digital library” was used in the searches in conjunction with other descriptors representing the various topics related to organisational and people issues. Nevertheless, this does not take into account journal articles that do not mention any of the digital library terms and yet, may discuss digital library themes. Hence, certain issues might have been under‐represented in this study.

This review and meta‐analysis is the first that focuses on analysing digital library research that has a focus on organisational and people issues. Given the manifestos that digital libraries are to grow into socio‐technical systems that function within an organisation and society, the subject area as a whole has also evolved over the years, with a move away from purely technical issues towards the application, use and effectiveness issues. Therefore, it is highly likely that research into these emerging issues will continue to grow and this review provides a preliminary overview of this important development as well as a point of departure to highlight gaps in the literature.

Culture is considered a critical aspect of social media usage. The purpose of this paper is to explore how cultures and languages influence multilingual users' cross-cultural information sharing patterns.

This study used a crowdsourcing survey with Amazon Mechanical Turk to collect qualitative and quantitative data from 355 multilingual users who utilize two or more languages daily. A mixed-method approach combined statistical, and cluster analysis with thematic analysis was employed to analyze information sharing patterns among multilingual users in the Chinese cultural context.

It was found that most multilingual users surveyed preferred to share in their first and second language mainly because that is what others around them speak or use. Multilingual users have more diverse sharing characteristics and are more actively engaged in social media. The results also provide insights into what incentives make multilingual users engage in social media to share information related to Chinese culture with the MOA model. Finally, the ten motivation factors include learning, entertainment, empathy, personal gain, social engagement, altruism, self-expression, information, trust and sharing culture. One opportunity factor is identified, which is convenience. Three ability factors are recognized consist of self-efficacy, habit and personality.

The findings are conducive to promoting the active participation of multilingual users in online communities, increasing global resource sharing and information flow and promoting the consumption of digital cultural content.