Implementation and Evaluation of a Multilingual Search Pilot in the Europeana Digital Library

Abstract

Europeana, a digital library that aggregates content from libraries, archives and museums from all around Europe, offers search functionality using the metadata of more than 62 million objects. However, in most cases, this data is only available in one language, while users come from countries with different languages. Europeana’s strategy for the improvement of multilingual experiences includes the design and implementation of a multilingual information retrieval system based on the translation of queries and metadata to English. As a first development in this context, we have implemented a pilot applying query translation to English for the Spanish version of the website in order to surface results that have English metadata associated with them. We conducted an evaluation to assess the performance of this pilot and identify issues. The good performance rates observed allowed us to take the pilot to production, and the issues identified led to a list of specific actions, which should be addressed to the extent possible before the application of a wider multilingual information retrieval system.