Multilinguality of Metadata

Abstract

Digital cultural heritage portals provide universal access to cultural objects and associated metadata originating in divers countries and language milieus. Offering an equally heterogeneous audience access to this content is a challenging endeavour. To ensure accessibility for audiences with different linguistic backgrounds, it is crucial that the underlying metadata offers the same information in several languages. This paper presents the conceptualisation and implementation of a metric for measuring the multilinguality in the digital cultural heritage portal Europeana. For every field in each record across the entire collection, the level of multilinguality can be assessed. Quantifying the multilingual richness of data has significant benefits for increasing metadata quality, improving multilingual access to cultural collections and reaching multilingual audiences.