Thank you, Larisa. This makes sense. In fact, that's precisely the point of organization of information (i.e., cataloguing and classification) as a discipline, skill, and institutional practice. Namely, it`s meant to provide you, as a library patron, with seamless access to the materials you need, no matter what language or format they are in. A few issues arise from the point of view of the library technical personnel such as library cataloguers. They need standards and procedures for dealing with foreign language materials in order to keep the collection consistent, and thus you -- happy as the collection user so that you know what to expect and how to find what you need. They also need experts.

Someone in technical personnel obviously had to catalogue the work by Luzina (i.e., describe the physical item at hand) before it reached the shelf and was included in the searchable catalogue. Even if that hypothetical item came with a record, someone still most likely had to re-check it and possibly modify it. So, what might be the problem? Just one, in principle.

Someone had to be able to decipher Cyrillic (at the very least on the title page) and preferably even provide some controlled vocabulary that describes the content of the hypothetical book. This means he or she needed to know Russian. Well, while there shouldn't be any shortage of Russian-speakers at University of Haifa, I take it, would they also happen to have an expert for each other language used in their collection? Even Russian transliteration requires standardization (e.g., ю = yu | ю = iou), but imagine, say, Japanese. (You can appreciate the complexity by consulting this 19 page Library of Congress document: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/japanese.pdf.) At times, it's even difficult to tell what language a book is written in (e.g., Russian vs Bulgarian or Japanese vs Mandarin).

The bottom line is that libraries with foreign languages collections can either limit the number of languages they work with to the expertise of the personnel (hopefully matching the patrons' interests). or, they come up with various solutions for the language collections they do not have expertise in (e.g., Stanford University pages have useful links: https://lib.stanford.edu/metadata-department/useful-links-belles-lettres-cataloging)

Traditionally libraries have kept various cheat-sheets, dictionaries and lists of terms to get out of this predicament, adopted codes and procedures on this matter, and preferred to go to subject matter experts for verification.

Language technologies nowadays are changing the scene, in particular, machine translation and language identification software have the potential to do so. The problems are first, the technology is not perfect and libraries are set in ways of doing things. My original question was rather broad and probably needed elaboration. In part, I was looking for experts' knowledge on how libraries might be adjusting to these language technologies in terms of new procedures and resources available to them, if at all. Interestingly enough, the issues of organizing information in foreign languages is not limited to libraries but rather carries over to digital resources, esp. website organization. I imagine retail web-sites deal with it, but I don't have direct knowledge of where this might be an issue and how it is being solved.

Does this make sense? Any further thoughts?

At here in Library we have some collection (books. journals, A/V tools) in other than English language.

we catalog that in roman English.

In every library, collection is available in different languages, In India particularly there are 14 languages , majority of the library management software are unicode base, in which you can enter the metadata of the document in that particular language and also retrieve the same language.

For example Koha library Management software is unicode base software, you can enter the metada of any languate which are available in unicode.

Thank you, that's good to know. So, language input might be an issue, if the software doesn't deal with unicode-based scripts. That's an important issue, and it is certainly wider than just library. Mobile devices come to mind. Arabic and Mandarin were brought to my attention before as particularly difficult since they require multiple steps (type in, select, correct) with the Roman alphabet-based keyboards.

Suresh Patil, may I ask you to list the 14 languages in Koha, please? Just curious.

Shahar Faizi, sorry, could you be more specific. I don't know where the Urban Unit is. Also, I understand about cataloguing in English, but also does it mean that the speakers of a particular language would never see any subject terms in their own language? Are they fine with that?

Our library - a biomedical (cancer) library - has books and journals both in English and in Italian. But it depends on the target population. Both scientific researchers and clinicians of our instutition - an Italian Cancer Comprehensive Centre - are able to read English and also write and speak (even if not all are so fluent and good). Our effort is in collecting, assessing and producing materials for/and with patienst in Italian language as this is our mother tongue. Providing patients with material in other languages is not an aim because there is a lot of available and reliable material in English, French and Spanish. We are also implementing a database of Informational material for cancer patients in Italian language for filling the gap in this field (see CIGNOweb.it)

hello Victoria Rubin,

I was very pleased to have received your message. Actually, I'm a university library where the collection is comprised of several languages ​​literature most notably in English and French. Indeed ratings and indexes made ​​to the organization of information / knowledge is made ​​taking primacy subjects treated in them and not the stock. the times we have had difficulties in indexing written in different bulk materials due to not field these languages​​.

Euclides Cumbe, hello to you too. Sorry I didn't notice your message till now. So, how do you get out of these difficulties? What are your typical solutions? Could you give me a concrete example please? Thanks for your input!

Resources are integrated within the collections : ie journals are filed alphabetically here, foreign language journals are filed alphabetically within this collection;  Beilstein (organic chemistry) German and English volumes are interfiled in the Organic Checmistry section of the Reference collection according to LC call number. 

There are a number of points in the life cycle where challenges manifest, notably acquisitions and cataloguing. Different institutions have strategies in place to cope with the challenges. But the common fail point I am most interested in is the Web catalogue. The basic principles of Web internationalisation have been available since 1998. Yet most library catalogues fail. Thsee failures also tend to be failures of a number of Web accessibility sucess criteria.

I have observed that collecting foreign languages library resources with MARC records from not-so-big publishers/vendors have remained a challenge. At a point in my work of collecting world languages & diversity resources, it is observed that adhering to languages with popular diacritics, consider vendors could provide EDI (electronic data interchange) and reliable invoicing remains the best option in organizing and accessing the library resources.