This is a working paper that describes the potential for developing multilingual subject gateways.

DESIRE is proposing that subject gateways can be developed to help serve the information needs of researchers across Europe. Different members of this user group however, conduct their work in different languages, and gateways need to provide for this.

This paper describes a review of the current practices of subject gateways, search engines and libraries. From this review, three key issues for multilingual developments have been identified:

• strategic issues: deciding between a centralised or distributed gateway
• technical issues
• interface issues

The centralised model has been demonstrated by The Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG) where staff have set up a system whereby librarians or academics across Europe can contribute resources to the central SOSIG service. Selection criteria and cataloguing rules for multilingual resources were developed and these are described in the report.

The distributed model has been demonstrated by Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Netherlands) and SOSIG (UK) who have both developed their own ROADS gateways, based in their own countries and have then enabled the two distributed databases to be simultaneously cross-searched.

DESIRE concludes that the distributed database model holds the most promise for developing multilingual gateways. The potential is there, for Europe to create an international network of subject gateways that could all be simultaneously cross-searched. The benefits would be great, as the subject and language skills of librarians and academics across Europe could be used to select and catalogue resources, creating a virtual collection of high quality Internet resources written in all European languages.

DESIRE is promoting the development of a European network of subject gateways and contact details are given for national and academic libraries or institutions interested in developing their own gateways as part of this strategy.