The Use of Cyrillic Metadata for Enhancing Discovery of Russian Digital Collection Items: A Case Study of the Bowman Gray World War I Postcards Digital Collection

Abstract

This paper examines the online discoverability of multilingual digital collections, focusing on the effectiveness of romanized and original script metadata for providing access to materials in non-roman script languages. Using the World War I Postcards from the Bowman Gray Collection digital collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a case study, the dynamics of Russian-language user access to postcards with and without Cyrillic description were compared with those of other major language user groups accessing the collection. While limited on a dependence on Google's system of determining user language, the results suggest that the nature of the Cyrillic metadata included in postcard records, limited to title, publisher, and other information transcribed from the resource in a bibliographic cataloging context, did not enhance the discoverability of the postcards. Moreover, every language group was at a distinct disadvantage compared to English-language users in terms of numbers of items discovered. In conclusion, I discuss various factors that may have affected these results, as well as implications for cultural heritage institutions with multilingual and multi-script collections.Master of Science in Information Scienc