Free access to 48 European national libraries with materials in 35 languages.
Not to mention 25 million pages of scanned material read by OCR.
Collection access via several interfaces.
Any library with web access should be able to offer its multi-lingual patrons, Europeans ones anyway, with primary materials in languages of their preference.
Topic map mavens will no doubt want to push further than hyperlinks to language specific collections.
Questions:
Assume your library director has grown tired of “topic maps would…” type suggestions and asks you for a proposal to use topic maps to integrate part of the European Library materials into the local collection.
- How would you choose the parts of each collection to be part of the topic map? (2-3 pages, no citations)
- What other members of the library staff would you involve in planning the proposal/prototype? (2-3 pages, with attention to the skill sets needed)
- Outline your prototype topic map and create a small but workable topic map to demonstrate the mapping you propose to use. (3-5 pages, no citations. Topic map without a custom interface. Very necessary step for a successful topic map deployment but beyond the time we have here.)