Inventories, discovery of digitised content, multilingualism issues Working group Multilingualism and thesaurus Subgroup

Good Practices on multilingualism

Czech Republic

Museum of Puppets in Chrudim
http://www.puppets.cz/
This website i available in 6 languages, although it does not provide sophisticated search facilities.

Estonia

Estonian National Museum
http://www.erm.ee
The full contents of the site are available in Estonian, English, Finnish and Russian.

Germany

Virtual Library for Anthropology EVIFA
http://www.evifa.de
Online resources are accessed via a search mask and browsing structure for topics (using a thesaurus provided by the International Bibliography of Anthropology IBA) and sources in English and German.

Virtual Library of Contemporary Art ViFaArt
http://vifaart.slub-dresden.de
It makes available ArtGuide, a catalogue of annotated Internet sites. The site offers German and English language systematics for geographic regions, time and "source" types, as well as alphabetical subject headings for content documentation and linguistic labeling in English and German.

International Architecture Database – archINFORM
http://www.archinform.net
In addition to the static context of the website and the navigation, dual language tools in English and German are made available for retrieval purposes. Personal names can be located alphabetically, and subject headings and geographic terminology can also be searched in a hierarchic order. Recording of further foreign language terminology - including languages from outside the European Union - is already partially realized. A few terms can also be acoustically selected in German, English, French and Italian.

Greece

Myriobiblos, the Digital Library of the Church of Greece
http://www.myriobiblos.gr
It makes its content available using a bilingual Greek-English vocabulary.

Benaki Musem
http://www.benaki.gr
It makes its collections available using a bilingual Greek-English vocabulary.

Museum of Cycladic Art
http://www.cycladic-m.gr makes its collections available using a bilingual Greek-English vocabulary.

Hungary

The Fine arts in Hungary
http://www.hung-art.hu/index-e.html
It is bilingual in English and Hungarian. Its cultural content is professional but can be searched by different aspects in both languages.

Embroidered Egg collection
http://datan-datenanalyse.de/Tojas/index.html
This  website has 8 language interfaces.

Israel

The Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names of the Yad Vashem Archives http://www.yadvashem.org/wps/portal/IY_HON_Welcome The
Page of Testimony registry uses a thesaurus, is bi-directional and truly multilingual (with over 10 languages equated to two main searchable languages: Hebrew and English). The advanced searches query the following fields:  Names, Places, Date, Submitter, and Family Members.

Jerusalem Virtual Library - The Academic Database On Historic Jerusalem
http://www.jerusalem-virtual-library.org/public/jvlfinal/index.html/
This is a more complex thesaurus data retrieval mechanism that equates one word to many, e.g. "temple period" to "early roman".  Also a unique index of keywords set up in a tree format.  Book results can be viewed as a text or pdf or only the bibliography citation. Monolingual controlled terms vocabulary (only English), although the website titles are trilingual (Arabic, Hebrew, English).

IMAGINE Thesaurus of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem
http://www.imj.org.il/youthwing/livingtogether/searchEng.asp
The thesaurus is hierarchal, Truly Bilingual, bi-directional with Integrated images; contains over 50,000 edited bilingual terms. The Israel Museum uses the lexicon for three main functions: to unify terminology in its database system, to enable more streamlined searches and to aid in the translation of data. The Israel Museum is preparing to translate its lexicon to other languages, at present the lexicon is available in Hebrew and English; Arabic and Russian are planned. There are 10 tables in the lexicon with some 35 sub-tables. The sub-tables build the hierarchical element of the lexicon (broad terms and narrow terms). In addition there are synonyms saved as alternate terms.
Internet accessible multilingual controlled vocabularies, There are some ten subject listings: Artists, Credit, Keywords, Materials, Object name, Periods, Place, Staff, Storage, Technique.  Hebrew and English, Russian and Arabic languages pending. A trilingual (Hebrew, Arabic, English) searchable hierarchal database exists online in the image filled "Living Together Project".

The Henrietta Szold Institute Database
http://www.szold.org.il/
http://www.snunit.k12.il/
The bibliographical database covers scholarly publications by Israeli researchers produced in Israel and overseas on the subjects of education, psychology, sociology, demography, social welfare, labor, communication, criminology, management and political science.

Italy

Superintendence of Venice
http://www.soprintendenze.beniculturali.it
The website is available in 8 European languages.

Library Claudia Augusta of the provincial administration of Bolzano, Trentino-Alto Adige region
http://www.bpi.claudiaugusta.it/
The Bolzano province is bilingual Italian-German and this web site is organised in 3 sections, Italian, English, and German; the catalogue is only in Italian and German).

Civic network of South Tirol
http://www.provinz.bz.it/index_i.asp
The web site available in Ladin, Italian, German, French.

Ladin Cultural Institute
http://www.istladin.net/web/default.asp
The web site is available also in Italian, German, English.

On line Sardinian Dictionary
http://www.ditzionariu.org/home.asp?lang=sar
on-line Sardinian dictionary with translation to Italian, French, English, German,
Spanish.

Slovene research Institute of Trieste
http://www.lscmt.univ.trieste.it/slori/Homepage.htm
The web site is available in Slovene, Italian, and English.

Regione Valle d'Aosta
http:/www.regione.vda.it/default_i.asp
The official web site is in Italian and partially in French.

Malta

Malta Tourism Authority's Website
www.visitmalta.com
The website is  available in nine language interfaces: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Chinese and Japanese.Netherlands

Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts of Museum Meermanno and the Royal Library http://www.kb.nl/kb/manuscripts/browser/index.html
This website is a good example of an Iconclass implementation.

Norway

Multilingual library
The multilingual library, a part of the Deichman Library in Oslo, has books in 28 languages and staff from 25 countries. The Multilingual Library was established as a separate entity in 1983 and has its own website with links to resources for immigrants and people from ethnic minorities.

Bazar
http://www.bazar.deichman.no/
It is a website for language minorities in Norway and is available in 14 languages and is a unique
possibility to reach language minorities in their own language on their own premises. Bazar is developed and run by the Multilingual Library with funding from ABM-utvikling.

Vadso museum has a multilingual website
http://museumsnett.no/alias/HJEMMESIDE/vadsomuseet/
The text is in Norwegian, English and Finnish/Kven.

Kulturnett Troms
http://troms.kulturnett.no/samegillii/
It is part of Kulturnet.no (the "website for culture in Norway"), run by ABM-utvikling on behalf of the Ministry for Culture and Church Affairs. Kulturnett Troms - is multilingual sami and Norwegian.

Sami radio
http://www.samiradio.org/
Run by the Norwegian non-commercial broadcasting company, it has a multilingual website () in North-sami, Lule-sami, South-sami and Norwegian.

Sami Parliament
http://www.samediggi.no
The Sami parliament runs a website with information about sami politics and government, but also information to the citiens from health to culture. It is in Norwegian and sami.

Poland

The Best Practice examples were chosen according to a number of criteria: the percentage of information translated into a foreign language; more than one foreign language versions; search mechanism or online catalogue accessible in a foreign language; easy access to
information for user,simple switching between the languages.

University Library in Wrocaw
http://www.bu.uni.wroc.pl
90% available in English and German with both searching and the on-line catalogue in the two languages.

Technical University of Lodz - Main Library
http://www.bg.p.lodz.pl
70% available in English with both searching and and the on-line catalogue available in English.

Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum in O wicim
http://www.auschwitz-birkenau.oswiecim.pl
100% available in English and German with searching in both languages.

The Malbork Castle Museum
http://www.zamek-malbork.pl
100% available in English and German with searching in both languages.

The State Archive in Siedlce
http://www.archiwumpanstwowe.siedlce.com/index.html
80% available in English and French.

The State Archive in Pock
http://www.archiwum.plock.com
80% available in English and Russian.

BWA Gallery in Bydgoszcz
http://www.bwa.bydgoszcz.com
100% available in English and German

Katarzyna Napirkowska Art Gallery
http://www.galeriakn.home.pl
90% available in English and 70% available in German and French.

Russian Federation

State Hermitage website
http://www.hermitage.ru
It presents cultural content including a digital collection and provides excellent search facilities for the content including QBIC search - an image content search that lets to find works of art by their visual details. The site content is available in more than one language etc. The State Hermitage website was designed and developed with the help of IBM.

The portal "Museums in Tatarstan"
http://www.tatar.museum.ru
It has Tatar, Russian and English versions and is oriented to various user communities, including the Tatar diaspora abroad. The portal has its singularity: audio fragments (texts, Tatar poetry and music) in the Tatar, Russian and English versions of the portal.

Slovenia

COBISS.SI
http://www.cobiss.si/
(Co-operative Online Bibliographic System & Services)  is a shared bibliographic database (union catalogue) created by 280 participating libraries and is developed and maintained by the Institute for Information Science Maribor. It is a network application that allows libraries and end users online access to the bibliographic databases in the COBISS system as well as to various specialised databases (of local and foreign database providers) on local servers or remote Z39.50 servers. Of the three user interfaces (Telnet, Windows and Web), the most popular is the Web interface. It is fully bilingual in Slovene and English.

Narodna galerija
http://www.ng-slo.si/)
National Gallery is the main art museum in Slovenia containing the largest visual arts collection from the late medieval period to the early twentieth century. The information on collections, exhibitions and events is bilingual in Slovene and English and in some cases also German. There are two databases (Art in Slovenia, European Paintings) containing digital images of paintings and sculptures as well as the description of artifacts available on the National Gallery web pages.  The search interface and the descriptions are available in Slovene language only.

City museum of Ljubljana
http://www.mm-lj.si/
It is a comprehensive museum storing the material evidence of human existence in the area of the Ljubljana (Slovene capital) of the last five millennia.  The museum keeps several hundred thousand artefacts which testify to the history of the city and the people who lived and worked there. The web presentation of the museum matches almost all quality principles criteria. It is fully bilingual in Slovene and English including the small database of the museums digital collection, called virtual room.

The Architecture Museum of Ljubljana
http://www.arhmuz.com/
It is the central Slovenian museum for architecture, physical planning, industrial and graphic design and photography. The museum collects, stores, studies and presents material from these areas of creativity at temporary and permanent exhibitions. The museum covers the entire history of these activities from the first human presence in the area of present-day Slovenia. The museums web presentation is attractive and fully bilingual. No databases of digitized content are available.

The Moderna Galerija (Gallery of the Contemporary Art)
http://www.mg-lj.si/
It houses the national collection of 20th century Slovene art (paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings as well as photography, video and electronic media collections), a collection of works from the former Yugoslavia, and the international collection Arteast 2000+. The national collection presents the basic stages in the development of the Slovene tradition of modern and contemporary art from the beginning of the 20th century onwards. The web presentation of the Gallery is attractive and well organized. It is fully bilingual including the virtual collection and the database on artists, their education, bibliography, awards and exhibitions.

United Kingdom

Gathering the Jewels
http://www.gtj.org.uk/
The full contents of this website and the underlying database are bilingual in Welsh and English. It is easy to switch between languages.

Multikulti
http://www.multikulti.org.uk/
This is an online information service that provides advice, guidance and learning materials in 13 community languages. The full contents of the site are available in each language. The website itself has been developed using Unicode to support non-latin scripts but advises users that there may be some difficulty in viewing certain language texts, particularly Bengali, Farsi and Gujerati and, for these languages PDFs are delivered as well as Unicode text.

Milestones Museum
http://www.milestones-museum.com
This website is fully accessible to BSL (British Sign Language) users. BSL versions of the text are made available using video clips with captions to allow BSL users to absorb the information about the museum's collections on the website.