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TLA 2005 April 5-9 Austin Convention Center
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• Virtual Reference Services
• In
• Multilingual Environment

Speaker Yuhfen Diana Wu Diana.wu_at_sjsu.edu http//
www.sjsu.edu/dwu
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WWW and Internet Users

• Diversity of Internet Users -
• 80 non-English Users
• More then 50 are non-English Contents
• U.S. Hispanics are biggest share of Spanish
  speakers online (http//www.clickz.com/news/articl
  e.php/2110451)
• Use of Internet in Latin America projected to be
  75 millions up from 15 millions in 2000
• (http//www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?fVSart_id
  905356630reltrue)

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Multilingual Virtual Reference Collaborations

• In the United States
• AskNow offers English and Spanish versions
• New York Suffolk Library in English, Spanish and
  Chinese
• Multi-national Collaborations
• Follow the Sun HelpDesk
• by London School of Economics
• (UK, Australia, and U.S.A.)
• VraagPunt at University Library K.U. Leuven of
  Belgium in Dutch and English
• Regional in Spain and Portugal

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Live Reference Services in Chinese at Suffolk
County Library, New York
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San Jose Library Homepage
Spanish Chinese Vietnamese
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San Jose Library Homepage
Spanish Chinese Vietnamese
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Chinese Home Pageby Yahoo and Google
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Google Language Tools
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OCLC FirstSearch in Multiple Languages
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ProQuest in Multiple Languages
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Approaches and Solutions for Multilingual
Information Retrieval

• Dictionary-based
• Corpus-based
• Hybrid or Knowledge-based
• Human Interactions

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Expectations

• Ease of Use for Users
• Outcome to be Accurate
• Real-time Retrieval around the Clock
• Cost Effectiveness for Provider

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Technical Difficulties

• Inter-operability among diverse operating systems
  and applications
• Lack of standard in encoding
• Complexity and irregularity among languages

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Google Language Translation
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AltaVista Language Translation
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Live Reference Services in Chinese at Suffolk
County Library, New York
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Live Reference Services in Spanish at San Jose
Library via AskNow, California
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Online Tutor via El Paseo Public Library, Texas
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Our Challenges

• Challenges for Virtual Reference Services in
  Multilingual Environment
• Technical Development and Supports
• Staff Qualifications and Training
• Quality Control and Assessment
• Policies

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Two photographs taken in Essaouira, Morocco

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VIRTUAL REALITY
Resources in all formats and languages