Bilingual Archives

[vicky.foulk...@googlemail.com]

Hi All,

I've received a question from our archivists regarding the cataloguing of an archive.  The archive contains material in both English and Welsh and they were wondering if it's possible to catalogue each part in the language of that part of the archive, and not fully bilingual. Hopefully the following explains it a bit better
Fonds = Bilingual description
Sub-fonds A = English description only
Sub-fonds B = Welsh description only
Sub-fonds C = Bilingual descriptions
Sub-fonds D = Welsh description only
Sub-fonds E = Welsh description only

My question is has anybody done this before?  Have you come across any issues with taking this approach?  Is it possible to do this without causing any issues with the archival tree? In an ideal world it would be good if the whole archive were catalogued bilingually but I believe time and resources are an issue here.  We're going to do some basic testing on our test instance to see how this works (if at all), especially when it comes to the OAI-PMH side of things. That will only take the Primary language the of the archive, which in this instance I think will be Welsh, but for those parts of the archive that don't have a Welsh archival description the English metadata should filter through to the Welsh interface and OAI-PMH.

Thanks,

Vicky