Best Practices for Multilingual Access
This White Paper aggregates resources and best practices for realizing multilingual access to cultural heritage content in digital libraries.
It offers recommendations and resources for overcoming challenges in letting users access content they might not understand. It addresses cultural heritage professionals and wants to give practical advice for common problems. It shows examples from the cultural heritage domain, lists research that addresses the implementation of multilingual access and gathers best practices from various projects within the domain.
The paper focuses on three different components of multilingual cultural heritage information systems – the data, the interactions and the interface. Additionally, common pitfalls are addressed and suggestions for evaluating multilingual components are gathered.
It is an extended version of a deliverable published within the EU-funded project Europeana v3.0. Many cultural heritage professionals from the Europeana Network followed the open call to contribute their expertise to this work, resulting in a rich resource reflecting multiple perspectives.