Distributed Chinese bibliographic searching
Mun-Kew Leong, Lei Cao, Yongmei Lu · Communications of the ACM · 1998
Chinese library (CLiB) was created as a pilot project in Singapore, to demonstrate distributed multilingual searching of heterogeneous bibliographic library databases. The first phase focused on supporting access to Chinese bibliographic records in primarily English-based computerized library systems. Users accessed CLib via the Web sending multilingual queries to specified libraries and receiving bibliographic information through any Chinese-enabled browser. The CLib server either distributed the searches using Z39.50 protocol to libraries that supported Chinese or searched a local multilingual bibliographic database. Results were collated, filtered, and sorted for return. Here the authors have focused on language support issues, clearly seen by following a user search from start to end. Where a library had Chinese data not supported by its library system, CLib developed a bibliographic database that provided full (Unicode) multilingual support for all fields as well as sophisticated name and state-of-the-art freetext searching. The trade-off was that this database was not integral to the library system and required regular batch updates.