Sustaining multilinguality: Case studies of two American multilingual digital libraries

Language barriers have greatly limited information access for many digital libraries. Only a few digital libraries currently provide multilingual services because maintaining a multilingual digital library requires tremendous financial support and considerable technical capabilities. There are no studies exploring the successful multilingual digital libraries. And it is unclear what factors have contributed to their success. Through a case study of two American multilingual digital libraries, this study attempts to investigate the technical and practical challenges digital libraries encounter in building and sustaining multilinguality, in order to identify the factors contributing to their successes and thus develop a model for sustaining multilingual services. Qualitative methods including in-depth interviews and content analysis will be employed to collect and analyze the data. The outcomes of this study are expected to provide useful guidelines and insights for the digital library community to provide multilingual services