Sharing and accessing Internet resources across barriers of nation, language, and collection. Sponsored by SIG III, MGT

While the Internet provides great opportunities for sharing and accessing information resources globally, there are still many barriers to overcome. In this session, a group of experts will share their research in this area. Vaughan and Thelwall will present their study on national bias of information resources coverage as reflected in commercial search engines. In the area of cross‐language information retrieval, although many search engines have the capability to retrieve information in Chinese using English queries, there has not been research on evaluation of the search capabilities and retrieval performances of such search engines. Shaoyi He will fill this gap in his presentation on such evaluations. Finally, Shreve and Zeng will discuss their approach of how to use parallel metadata to provide multilingual / multicultural access to a linguistically heterogeneous collection in an NSF‐funded digital library project.