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This paper aims to understand user information behaviours when they perform multilingual information retrieval. It also offers reference for the development of multilingual information retrieval systems and relevant service platforms.

The authors designed an experiment on multilingual information retrieval with WorldWideScience, utilized Camtasia studio7 (a screen capturing and recording tool) to record overall operational processes of subjects and collected participants’ thought processes with think-aloud protocols. Meanwhile, a questionnaire survey and interviews were used to examine the subjects’ background information, their feelings for the experiment and their ideas about the experimental platform, respectively. Thirty-two valid data points were obtained by 41 subjects.

The users preferred their own language for retrieval. Most users from social science chose general search or advanced search freely according to the tasks. The majority of the participants selected key words directly from the tasks as search terms. Doctoral candidates were more likely to construct a search query with logic symbols. Translation tools were utilized for assisting retrieval and solving doubts of translation. When facing obstacles, users stayed on the original web page to explore continually, followed by back to homepage.

This paper provides a study of user behaviour through investigating how users behave on the whole process of retrieving multilingual information. The findings offer advice for optimizing the function of multilingual information retrieval systems and service platforms.

Purpose – Global cooperation between and within organisations has become essential for successful businesses. For the information management within such an international and necessarily multilingual environment, new challenges arise due to the diversity of the stakeholders and participants as well as due to the heterogeneity of approaches and traditions of information handling.

Design/methodology/approach – Key technologies like search technologies need to be adapted to support content in multiple languages and efficient access to it. Information processes need to be analysed while bearing in mind that problems may arise due to cross-cultural misunderstandings. The diversity requires appropriate treatment and appropriate methods in information systems in order to improve international information flows.

Findings – This chapter identifies some of these challenges and shows how they can be approached from an information science perspective. User-oriented research at the University of Hildesheim in the areas information retrieval, information seeking and human–computer interaction is presented.

Originality/value – Global enterprises and organisations may use this chapter to identify challenges and solutions for adapting their information technology to an international scale. Researchers who work on multilingual information access and intercultural aspects of information systems get an overview on some current research.

This paper seeks to examine image retrieval within two different contexts: a monolingual context where the language of the query is the same as the indexing language and a multilingual context where the language of the query is different from the indexing language. The study also aims to compare two different approaches for the indexing of ordinary images representing common objects: traditional image indexing with the use of a controlled vocabulary and free image indexing using uncontrolled vocabulary.

This research uses three data collection methods. An analysis of the indexing terms was employed in order to examine the multiplicity of term types assigned to images. A simulation of the retrieval process involving a set of 30 images was performed with 60 participants. The quantification of the retrieval performance of each indexing approach was based on the usability measures, that is, effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of the user. Finally, a questionnaire was used to gather information on searcher satisfaction during and after the retrieval process.

The results of this research are twofold. The analysis of indexing terms associated with all the 3,950 images provides a comprehensive description of the characteristics of the four non‐combined indexing forms used for the study. Also, the retrieval simulation results offers information about the relative performance of the six indexing forms (combined and non‐combined) in terms of their effectiveness, efficiency (temporal and human) and the image searcher's satisfaction.

The findings of the study suggest that, in the near future, the information systems could benefit from allowing an increased coexistence of controlled vocabularies and uncontrolled vocabularies, resulting from collaborative image tagging, for example, and giving the users the possibility to dynamically participate in the image‐indexing process, in a more user‐centred way.

As international users increase rapidly, multilingual systems have become a very important service for global users. The purpose of this paper is to design and implement an ontology‐driven medical information retrieval (OMIR) system by building a medical ontology based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) medical records.

A traditional cataloging scheme is used as a navigation menu in the CDC system. This traditional cataloging scheme is transformed to a unique medical ontology for global users in the OMIR system. An experimental study was conducted on both an ontology‐driven medical information system (OMIR) and the CDC system.

The medical ontology can be used to filter out unsuitable resources based on semantic relationships. In addition, the recommended resources can be categorized and provide the patron with different languages to access resources. The OMIR system provides better relevancy and shorter search times compared with alternative systems.

The OMIR system is currently implemented for medical resources from the CDC. The developed method may also be applied to other domain areas.

This paper represents a practical method of building a multilingual medical information retrieval system and explains the functional use of ontological knowledge. This study provides insights into medical information seeking performance on the medical database systems.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the various issues involved in Indian languages computing, particularly Telugu, like creating, displaying, searching and retrieving digital content. The paper also aims to emphasize the issues involved in retrieval in Indian languages. The complexities presented by the grammar, syntax and morphology of Indian languages are discussed.

The paper undertakes and presents descriptive study of the issues and challenges in Indian languages computing in general and Telugu language in particular.

The problem of multilingual information retrieval in Indian languages is multi‐pronged. A major observation of this study is that, though digital content is available in Indian languages, it is mostly in non‐standard encoding format and fonts. There is an urgent need to work in the area of developing search algorithms for Indian languages, like soundex and metaphones to tolerate spelling variations and mistakes that a user might make in queries and suggest correct spelling(s).

With existing technologies libraries can now build online catalogues in the language of the documents or build digital repositories with content in various Indian languages. Though a few library automation software like NewGenLib and digital library software like DSpace, etc. are offering Unicode support for Indian languages, they do not allow for different types of search such as truncation search, word variants, etc. The present study is a step towards developing algorithms for indexing and searching in Indian languages.

The paper addresses various issues in Indian language computing with emphasis on search and retrieval.

To share with readers the scope and content of presentations made at the CALIBER 2005 meeting.

Descriptive case studies and innovation were presented in the context of how progress in these areas has been made in both developing and developed parts of the world.

Information technology infrastructure allows for all these themes to be developed. An increased awareness of how workflow leads to new product development and new libraries services evolve is described in this conference report. The digital arena is explored from many vantage points including digital resources, consortia development, eLearning and eScholarship, and the changing role of the internet.

A scientific approach is tested in most of the research projects described with great dependence on a range of information technology tools that promote networking and digital library development.

International development takes place in a period of great collaboration and that spirit is widely pronounced at this conference and in the presentations made there. Practical Implications: Many different projects were shared ranging in scale from modest to highly sophisticated, involving one institution or a consortia. E‐Learning and distance education were environments that had high impact at this conference.

School library is regarded as the heart and soul of the school. It acts as learning resource centre and support the school curriculum in all possible manners. The main aim of this paper is to document the factors associated with library management in selected school libraries in Varanasi, India.

Survey method is used to conduct this research in which close-ended questions were provided to the school librarians. Simple random sampling was used to collect samples from secondary schools of Varanasi.

It was found that 34% school libraries affiliated to Central Board of Secondary Education are managed properly and they are termed as first class library. Rest of the schools are not managed as per rules and regulations of school librarianship. Some librarians themselves are not properly aware of the significance of the library and hence the management is suffered accordingly.

This research will help in exploring the existing status of library management in school libraries. The work is designed specifically for school libraries. Simple ranking system for school libraries will be helpful to make an exhaustive school ranking based on library management.

This research will bring on record the ground reality of school librarianship in India and the way they are managed. Simple ranking system for school library is given in this paper that will help to find out which school library is functioning properly or not.

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.

With the vast amount of multilingual information available online, it becomes increasingly critical for libraries to use various multilingual information access techniques in order to effectively support patrons' online information requests. However, this is still a relatively under‐explored area. This paper aims to study the effectiveness and the adoptability of query expansion and translation enhancement in the context of interactive multilingual information access.

Relying on an interactive multilingual information access system called ICE‐TEA, the authors conducted a controlled experiment (English‐to‐Chinese translation) involving human subjects to assess the retrieval effectiveness, analyzed the collected search logs to examine users' behavior, and employed pre‐ and post‐questionnaires to obtain users' opinions about the system.

The results confirm that significant improvement in retrieval effectiveness can be achieved by combining query expansion with translation enhancement (as compared to a case when there is no relevance feedback). However, users' ability to understand, interact with and even perceive the complex process of searches involving the combination of query expansion and translation enhancement may greatly impact the effectiveness of the techniques. The results also confirm that human‐generated queries were short queries, which calls for careful consideration of how longer queries perform in real search because many search engines rely on longer and more complex queries.

This study examines two important relevance feedback techniques in the context of human‐involved multilingual information access. This study is a valuable addition to the information seeking behaviour literature.

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.