Investigating Language Skills and Field of Knowledge on Multilingual Information Access in Digital Libraries

Digital libraries remove physical barriers to accessing information, but the language barrier still remains due to: multilingual collections and the linguistic diversity of users. This study aims at understanding the effect of users’ language skills and field of knowledge on their language preferences when searching for information online and to provide new insights on the access to multilingual digital libraries. Both quantitative and qualitative data were gathered using a questionnaire and results show that the language skills and the field of knowledge have an impact on the language choice for searching online. These factors also determine the interest in cross-language information retrieval: language–related fields constitute the best potential group of users, followed by the Arts and Humanities and the Social Sciences.