User Environment for Accessing Multilingual Digital Library

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Multilingual information environment is one of the most important aspects in the digital libraries for the global community. In addition, there are important aspects which has to be solved for information access in the digital libraries via the Internet in Japan, for examples character variants and characters not included in standard character sets. Based on these considerations, the researchers tackled information access support environment for international network of digital libraries using a multilingual HTML document browsing technology called MHTML that was originally developed in the University of Library and Information Science (ULIS). In this research, usability of the multilingual tool in the global information network environment was investigated collaborating with the researchers at School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh in USA.In this research, the following issues were investigated :(1) By using the MHTML technology, users can display, in principle, any foreign texts on his/her WWW browser which has no foreign character fonts. In this research, text input functions were investigated and developed in addition to the display function.(2) We have developed a set of Japanese old folk tales expressed in multiple languages. This collection of oldtales includes 11 tales in 11 languages. Translation were done not only by staffs at ULIS but also volunteers on the network.(3) A thesaurus of Japanese Kanji Variants were developed. The thesaurus includes sets of variants extracted in two principal Japanese Industrial Standard code sets that include more than 12,000 characters in total.(4) We have investigated metadata in multiple languages in two aspects, which are metadata description in multiple languages and metadata registry in multiple languages.All of these aspects are crucial for information access on the global network and the researchers will make continuing effort on these issues.