Citation
(2002), "Multilingual Access to Subjects (MACS) prototype", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 36 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/prog.2002.28036aab.008
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2002, MCB UP Limited
Multilingual Access to Subjects (MACS) prototype
Multilingual Access to Subjects (MACS) prototype
Multilingual Access to Subjects (MACS) aims to provide multilingual subject access to library catalogues. MACS enables users to simultaneously search the catalogues of the project's partner libraries in the language of their choice (English, French, German). The partners are: the Swiss National Library (SNL), project leader, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF), the British Library (BL) and Die Deutsche Bibliothek (DDB). The project is running under the auspices of the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL).
This multilingual search is made possible thanks to the equivalence links created between the three indexing languages used in these libraries:
Schlagwortnormdatei or SWD (for German), Répertoire d'autorité matière encyclopédique et alphabétique unifié or RAMEAU (for French) and Library of Congress Subject Headings or LCSH (for English). Topics (headings) from the three lists are analysed to determine whether they are exact or partial matches, of a simple or complex nature. The end result is neither a translation nor a new thesaurus but a mapping of existing and widely used indexing languages.
On the basis of this approach, a prototype has been developed by Index Data (Denmark) and Tilburg University Library (The Netherlands), which contains a small subset of data from the indexing languages and the libraries' databases, so that link creation and management and subsequent searching can be explored and tested.
Interested parties are welcome to test this prototype by signing up for a guest access password.
For further information please contact: Genevieve Clavel-Merrin, Swiss National Library, Hallwylstrasse 15, CH-3003 Bern, Switzerland. E-mail: genevieve.clavel@slb.admin.ch; URL: infolab.kub.nl/prj/macs