Integrated Information Access Technology for Digital Libraries: Access across Languages, Periods, and Cultures

Physical libraries store materials written in various languages, at various periods in history, and dealing with various cultures. As a result, large digital library projects such as Europeana, World Digital Library, HathiTrust, and Google Book Search have collections spanning different languages, periods, and cultures. This diversity complicates information access, in part because the grammars, vocabularies, and scripts of languages usually change significantly over time. This chapter presents our approach to providing cross-language access that accounts for this evolution of languages over periods ranging from ancient to modern and even considers cultural differences. It also presents our method for providing integrated access to multiple digital libraries, archives, and museums by automatically mapping between different metadata schemas. In section 2, we present the traditional Mongolian script digital library. Our proposed method for Cross-period information retrieval from ancient Japanese historical Materials is discussed in section 3. Later, in section 4, we introduce the federated searching system for humanities databases using automatic metadata mapping.