[OAI-implementers] Metadata Language Confusion

[Jonathan Tregear]

Hi,

I'm beginning a project to implement an OAI repository that will contain citations to Latin American medical journal articles we are collecting. We are receiving these citations in three languages: English, Spanish, and Portugeuse. One of the goals of the repository, in addition to being OAI compliant, is that users will be able to do article searching and discovery in any of these languages. However, I am totally confused about how to represent this multilingual metadata in the OAI protocol.

I have read some Dublin Core material that addresses this problem, but those solutions all  seem to be rdf solutions or older metatag solutions. I would like to implement this as a qualifier of some kind, but that probably isn't a legitimate solution. The final solution I have thought of is to implement three repositories, one for each language, but that doesn't seem too elegant.

I am new to this, so perhaps I am missing something obvious. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Jonathan Tregear
Analyst, Health Sciences Center
University of New Mexico
jtregear@salud.unm.edu