This presentation was provided by Farrah Lehman Den of The Modern Language Organization during the NISO Virtual Conference "Metadata and Discovery: Quality is Key." The event was held May 17, 2023.

1. Multilingual Metadata in the
MLA International Bibliography
Farrah Lehman Den, Senior Index Editor, Modern Language Association
Metadata and Discovery: Quality is Key, NISO Virtual Conference
17 May 2023

2. Multilingual Metadata Issues in Indexing:
1. Browser and user interface rendering
1. Searchability / discoverability in non-Latin alphabets

4. Right-to-Left Text
Rendering

5. Defining direction for RTL writing systems
Metadata editors for library cataloguing that insert Unicode to define direction
W3: Define language and directionality in the header (HTML)
TEI: Define language in header; additional markup is redundant (XML)

6. Text direction rendering can affect:
- Titles, especially when they are themselves multilingual
- Other bibliographic data
- Author-as-subject and work names in the MLAIB Thesaurus

7. Transliteration and Non-
Romanized Searching

8. Most Modern Hebrew transliteration standards: Librekhṭ, Savion

10. Korean Transliteration in the MLAIB:
- ALA-LC standard: Ensures cross-searching in library discovery services
- Revised Romanization: Used by many present-day scholars, including those
who design and maintain websites indexed by the MLAIB

14. Adding multilingual metadata to the MLAIB Thesaurus:
- PIDs (e.g. ISNI)
- VIAF
Data is still spotty in Thai, Urdu, and Central Asian languages.

15. Conclusions
1. Browser and user interface rendering issues – particularly for RTL
writing systems – become bibliographic metadata issues.
1. We can avoid duplication and discovery hindrances by including
searchable untransliterated names and works in the MLAIB.
1. Supplementing these records can be an onerous task, even with PIDs.