Landry, P.: MACS update : moving toward a link management production database (2003)
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- Abstract
- Introduction Multilingualism has long been an issue that have been discussed and debated at ELAG conferences. Members of ELAG have generally considered the role of automation as an important factor in the development of multilingual subject access solutions. It is quite fitting that in the context of this year's theme of "Cross language applications and the web" that the latest development of the MACS project be presented. As the title indicates, this presentation will focus an the latest development of the Link management Interface (LMI) which is the pivotal tool of the MACS multilingual subject access solution. It will update the presentation given by Genevieve ClavelMerrin at last year's ELAG 2002 Conference in Rome. That presentation gave a thorough description of the work that had been undertaken since 1997. In particular, G. Clavel-Merrin described the development of the MACS prototype in which the mechanisms for the establishment and management of links between subject heading languages (SHLs) and the user search interface had been implemented.
Conclusion After a few years of design work and testing, it now appears that the MACS project is almost ready to move to production. The latest LMI release has shown that it can be used in a federated work network and that it is robust enough to manage many thousands of links. Once in the production phase, consideration should be given to extend MACS to other SHLs in other languages. There is still a great interest from other CENL members to participate in this project and the consortium structure will need to be finalised in order to incorporate gradually and successfully new partners in the MACS system. Work will also continue to improve the Search Interface (SI) before it can be successfully integrated in each of the partners OPAC. In this context, some form of access to the local authority files should be investigated so that users can select the most appropriate heading within each subject hierarchies before sending their search to the different target databases. Testing of Z39.50 access to the partners' library catalogues will also continue to further refine search results. The long range prospect of the MACS initiative will have to be addressed in the foreseeable future. Financial as well as institutional support will need to be reinforced and possibly new types of partnership identified. As the need to improve subject access continues to be an issue for many European national libraries, MACS will hopefully remain a viable tool for ensuring cross-language access. One of the potential targets is the TEL project. Within the scope of that initiative, is it possible and useful to envisage the integration of MACS in TEL as an additional access point? It is worth stating the question in light of the challenge to European national libraries to offer improved access to their collections.
