How Multilingual Digital Information Is Used: A Study in Chinese Academic Libraries

Digital library, because of its resource demanding and other issues to solve, is an important application of multilingual information access (MLIA). However, the requirements of MLIA systems and applications are not typically addressed or assessed in our evaluations of digital libraries. This paper, therefore, aims to study the usages of MLIA in Chinese academic digital libraries. We conducted some surveys to study MLIA in current Chinese academic digital libraries and to get to know the users´ real requirements for MLIA in Chinese academic digital libraries. The initial results offer thoughts on specific MLIA functions and insights on future digital library design and developments.