Status Report Slides

1

CLA 2005 November 4-8 Pasadena Convention Cent
er
2

• Virtual Reference Services
• In
• Multilingual Environments

Speaker Yuhfen Diana Wu San Jose State Universit
y
Diana.wu_at_sjsu.edu http//www.sjsu.edu/dwu
3
WWW and Internet Users

• Diversity of Internet Users -
• 80 non-English Users
• More then 50 are non-English Contents
• Numbers of Internet user are growing daily about
  327 millions in Asia , 225 millions in EU, 202
  millions in the USA, and about 70 millions in
  Latin America
• (http//www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm )

4
Multilingual Virtual Reference Collaborations

• In the United States
• AskNow offers English and Spanish versions
• New York Suffolk Library in English, Spanish and
  Chinese
  
• Multi-national Collaborations
• Follow the Sun HelpDesk
• by London School of Economics
• (UK, Australia, and U.S.A.)
• VraagPunt at University Library K.U. Leuven of
  Belgium in Dutch and English
  
• Regional in Spain and Portugal

5
Live Reference Services in Chinese at Suffolk
County Library, New York
6
SJLibarary Online Catalog in English, Chinese,
Spanish, and Vietnamese
7
Chinese Home Pageby Yahoo and Google
8
Google Language Tools
9
ProQuest in Multiple Languages
10
Approaches and Solutions for Multilingual
Information Retrieval

• Dictionary-based
• Corpus-based
• Hybrid or Knowledge-based
• Human Interactions

11
Expectations

• Ease of Use for Users
• Outcome to be Accurate
• Real-time Retrieval around the Clock
• Cost Effectiveness for Provider

12
Technical Difficulties

• Inter-operability among diverse operating systems
  and applications
  
• Lack of standard in encoding
• Complexity and irregularity among languages

13
Google Language Translation
14
AltaVista Language Translation
15
Live Reference Services in Chinese at Suffolk
County Library, New York
16
Support for Localization
17
Our Challenges

• Challenges for Virtual Reference Services in
  Multilingual Environments
  
• Technical Development and Supports
• Staff Qualifications and Training
• Quality Control and Assessment
• Policies

18
Two photographs taken in Essaouira, Morocco

19
VIRTUAL REALITY
Resources in all formats and languages