Cross Library Services is the commercial spin-off of the CACAO project (Cross-Language Access to Catalogues and On-Line Libraries, funded under the eContentPlus Programme ) and inherits a substantial part the technology developed in that project.
CACAO offers an innovative approach for accessing, understanding and navigating multilingual textual content in digital libraries and library catalogues, enabling European users to better exploit the available European electronic content.
By coupling sound Natural Language Processing techniques with available information retrieval systems and tools for facilitating the maintenance of multilingual resources, CACAO delivered a non-intrusive infrastructure to be integrated with current library catalogues and digital libraries. As a result, the user is able to type in queries in his/her own language and retrieve volumes and documents in any available language.
Such an infrastructure is crucial to promote aggregation of content at the European level. Already during the lifetime of the project, CACAO promoted the aggregation of content, in particular:
- The largest European aggregation of digital libraries, The European Library adopted the CACAO infrastructure.
- The library catalogues of the five partner libraries were aggregated into a single multilingual access point.
- Three thematic portals aggregating several European collections (Mathematics, European History, Geography) were made available to the public.
