There is a Thin Line Between Speaking 30 Languages and Gibberish: Semantic and Multilingual Access in Europeana
This talk discusses multilingual and semantic access in Europeana, the European digital library, archive and museum that offers access to over 30 million cultural heritage objects. We will present recent implementations in the portal for accessing multilingual content and adding a semantic layer such as the query translation feature and the automatic enrichments with multilingual vocabularies. For making Europeana truly multilingual, the user perspective also needs to be taken into account, adding several new challenges to the portal development. We will address the most important country and language levels presenting a log file study focusing on Europeana as a multilingual portal (with multilingual content) for multilingual users. The lack of best practices in cultural heritage digital libraries on such a scale and the particularities of the digital objects and queries in these systems make it necessary to constantly monitor the quality of the implemented features with quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Results of some of these evaluations will be a further focus of the talk.
Juliane Stiller was visiting student here from April 2011 to April 2012. She is a researcher at Berlin School of Library and Information Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin where she works in the EU-funded project Europeana Version 3 on multilingual best practices. She also studies researchers' needs in virtual research environments in the project DARIAH-DE at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She obtained a doctoral degree in information science at Humboldt-Universität evaluating interactions in cultural heritage digital libraries. Prior to her research at the university, she worked several years at Google in Dublin, Ireland, as a search quality analyst.
Maria Gäde is a lecturer at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research focuses on digital library evaluation, in particular on user behavior and requirements for multilingual access in digital libraries. She holds a doctoral degree in information science (country and language level differences in multilingual digital libraries). Previously she was involved in the logCLEF multilingual log analysis evaluation initiative as well as in the Cultural Heritage in CLEF (CHiC) track dealing with the improvement of systematic and large-scale evaluation of cultural heritage digital libraries and information access systems. Currently she is co-organizing the interactive tasks in the Social Book Search Lab at CLEF.
Prof. Dr. Elke Greifeneder is a Juniorprofessor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin where she leads the research group information behavior. Her interests are human information behavior in user's natural environments, including effects of ubiquitous computing, effects of distractions and remote user testing. Previously she hold a position as assistant professor at the Royal School of Library and Information Science at the University of Copenhagen. Among other community services, she was the program chair of iConference 2014 and is the editor of Library Hi Tech (Emerald Publishing Group).