internetarchive
Difficulty Searching for Non-English Books
Description, Patron Story
Relevant Designs
Feedback Questions
Decisions
Stakeholders
It seems that, unless someone knows exactly what they're looking for, it can be difficult to use OL's catalogue as a non-English speaking user. For example, I selected my language as Ukranian and clicked on "Random Book". The website presented me with books in Mandarin an French, but no Ukranian. As well, when I went to browse by subject, all subject headings were in English, and the first books I encountered were also in English. This could be frustrating for patrons with limited English, or who prefer reading in another language. It would be best if OL prioritises the language a patron selects, including the books themselves and the subject headings.
It seems that, unless someone knows exactly what they're looking for, it can be difficult to use OL's catalogue as a non-English speaking user. For example, I selected my language as Ukranian and clicked on "Random Book". The website presented me with books in Mandarin an French, but no Ukranian.
I think, that " Random Book" chooses randomly out of all the books added to the Open Library. Selected language doesn't matter.
If you want to find Ukrainian books, you can make a search with this query "language:ukr" this will find all the works that have editions in Ukrainian. And then you can sort them by Random
As well, when I went to browse by subject, all subject headings were in English, and the first books I encountered were also in English. This could be frustrating for patrons with limited English, or who prefer reading in another language. It would be best if OL prioritises the language a patron selects, including the books themselves and the subject headings.
There is currently no solution for subject headings in other languages, but this feature is in development.
I understand your frustration with the catalogue being mostly books in English, but this is because most of the data on Open Library comes from the catalogues of English-speaking countries. So, data for other languages can be quite limited. I usually have to add books myself in Ukrainian or Japanese because they are not available or have a very bad data quality (titles in Latin rather than the script of the language, which makes them hard to find)
