Fwd: [OAI-implementers] Metadata Language Confusion

[Diane I. Hillmann]

Jonathan:

Some of the solution depends on whether the articles are each indeed in all 
three languages or whether it is only the titles and descriptions that are 
in different languages, and the article in one of those?

If this is the case, it should be possible to use the language qualifier 
for each title and description, and not necessarily have to create separate 
metadata records to do so. In DC, each of the elements is repeatable, 
partially to take care of just such a situation.  And as someone has 
already pointed out, much of the data is unaffected by the language issue.

If it were me, I would keep all the title and descriptive information on 
one article in one metadata record, and use the language qualifier (or 
not--it really isn't essential, if your goal is primarily indexing and 
discovery) to differentiate. Multiple titles and descriptions, so long as 
they're dealing with the **same article** should not be a problem.

Diane

At 09:29 PM 7/12/2001 -0400, you wrote:

>--- begin forwarded text
>
>Hi,
>
>I'm beginning a project to implement an OAI repository that will contain 
>citations to Latin American medical journal articles we are collecting. We 
>are receiving these citations in three languages: English, Spanish, and 
>Portugeuse. One of the goals of the repository, in addition to being OAI 
>compliant, is that users will be able to do article searching and 
>discovery in any of these languages. However, I am totally confused about 
>how to represent this multilingual metadata in the OAI protocol.
>
>I have read some Dublin Core material that addresses this problem, but 
>those solutions all  seem to be rdf solutions or older metatag solutions. 
>I would like to implement this as a qualifier of some kind, but that 
>probably isn't a legitimate solution. The final solution I have thought of 
>is to implement three repositories, one for each language, but that 
>doesn't seem too elegant.
>
>I am new to this, so perhaps I am missing something obvious. Any advice is 
>greatly appreciated.
>
>Jonathan Tregear
>Analyst, Health Sciences Center
>University of New Mexico
>jtregear@salud.unm.edu
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>OAI-implementers mailing list
>OAI-implementers@oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu
>http://oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu/mailman/listinfo/oai-implementers
>
>--- end forwarded text
>

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Diane I. Hillmann
Metadata Specialist
National Science Digital Library Project at Cornell
Department of Computer Science	Voice: 607/255-5691
419 Rhodes Hall       			Fax: 607/255-4428
Ithaca, NY 14853			Email: dih1@cornell.edu
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