MACS - Multilingual Access to Subjects

MACS aims to provide multilingual subject access to library catalogues. MACS enables users to simultaneously search the catalogues of the project's partner libraries in the language of their choice (English, French, German). The partners are:

Swiss National Library (SNL) project leader
Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF)
The British Library (BL)
Die Deutsche Bibliothek (DDB)

The project is running under the auspices of the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL).

This multilingual search is made possible thanks to the equivalence links created between the three indexing languages used in these libraries:

- SWD (for German)
- RAMEAU (for French)
- LCSH (for English)

Topics (headings) from the three lists are analysed to determine whether they are exact or partial matches, of a simple or complex nature. The end result is neither a translation nor a new thesaurus but a mapping of existing and widely used indexing languages. On the basis of this approach, a prototype has been developed by Index Data (Denmark) and Tilburg University Library (Netherlands) which contains a small subset of data from the indexing languages and the libraries' databases so that link creation and management and subsequent searching can be explored and tested. Interested parties are welcome to test this prototype by signing up for a guest access password at the following address:

http://infolab.kub.nl/prj/macs/
If you have questions or comments please contact MACS@slb.admin.ch
We are interested to know your reactions.

For further contacts:
Genevieve Clavel-Merrin
Swiss National Library
Hallwylstrasse 15
CH-3003 Bern

E-Mail: genevieve.clavel@slb.admin.ch
URL: http://www.snl.ch