Towards Multilingual Online Public Access Catalogues

With increasing moves towards an integrated Europe the need for multilingual access to information becomes more pressing. One aspect of this need which has largely been neglected is the provision of multilingual access to OPACs and this paper is concerned with exploring this problem area. The need for multilingual OPAC search capabilities and the difficulties associated with this are discussed. The problems of subject access in particular are highlighted. Research into subject searching in monolingual OPACs is reviewed and its relevance to multilingual OPACs is outlined. Given the limitations of current machine translation of natural language it is likely that the utilisation of controlled vocabulary will prove the best approach to the provision of multilingual subject search facilities. Finally some possible directions for further research are considered