1. 11th Annual Conference April 10-13, 2003 Charlotte, North Carolina

2. Multilingual Access and Virtual Reference Services
Author: Yuhfen Diana Wu

3. 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.)

4. 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

5. Approaches and Solutions for Multilingual Information Retrieval
Dictionary-based
Corpus-based
Hybrid or Knowledge-based
Human Interactions

6. Technical Difficulties
Inter-operability among diverse operating systems and applications
Lack of standard in encoding
Complexity and irregularity among languages

7. Outcomes and Expectations
Accuracy
Real-time retrieval
Cost Effectiveness

8. Google Language Tools

9. Yahoo Taiwan Home Page

10. AltaVista Language Translation

11. Challenges for Virtual Reference Services
Technical Development and Supports
Staff Qualifications and Training
Quality Control and Assessment
Policies

12. Support for Localization

13. Resources in all formats and languages
VIRTUAL REALITY
Resources in all formats and languages