Interactive document retrieval from multilingual digital repositories

On the contrary to multilingual information retrieval systems, digital libraries usually do not provide any support for query translation. This paper presents a study aimed at exploring the role of the translation component in a digital library system designed for multilingual access to resources. Thus, we propose a user oriented approach to one word query formulation aimed at browsing English and French document collections of digital libraries. In particular, the focus is on comparison of bilingual to monolingual harvesting of digital collections. We explore some multilingual repositories based on OPAC (online public catalogue) systems by utilization of metadata based search. The evaluation of the digital library systems selected relies on usability criteria. In addition, the search results are grouped into categories according to the language pair phenomena. A diversity of the library contents oriented towards domain specific network communities is also regarded as a relevance factor at the query formulation stage.