11th Annual Conference April 10-13, 2003 Charlotte, North Carolina
Multilingual Access and Virtual Reference Services Author: Yuhfen Diana Wu dwu@sjsu.edu http://library.sjsu.edu/staff/wu
Background Internet by 2005 Trends for Virtual Reference Services 80% non-English Users 50%+ non-English WWW Contents Trends for Virtual Reference Services Multi-national Collaborations QuestionPoints by Library of Congress Follow the Sun HelpDesk by London School of Economics (UK, Australia, and U.S.A.)
Multilingual Collaborations New York Public Library in English, Spanish and Chinese LSSI offers Spanish version VraagPunt at University Library K.U. Leuven of Belgium in Dutch and English Regional in Spain and Portugal
Approaches and Solutions for Multilingual Information Retrieval Dictionary-based Corpus-based Hybrid or Knowledge-based Human Interactions
Technical Difficulties Inter-operability among diverse operating systems and applications Lack of standard in encoding Complexity and irregularity among languages
Outcomes and Expectations Accuracy Real-time retrieval Cost Effectiveness
Google Language Tools
Yahoo Taiwan Home Page
AltaVista Language Translation
Challenges for Virtual Reference Services Technical Development and Supports Staff Qualifications and Training Quality Control and Assessment Policies
Support for Localization
Resources in all formats and languages VIRTUAL REALITY Resources in all formats and languages