Developing a multilingual, personalised medical library portal: use of MyLibrary in Slovenia

Abstract

The Central Medical Library (CMK) at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, created its Web site in 1997 and has since then been actively involved in its maintenance and improvement. The analysis of Web site usage, which was performed using different data‐mining methods, revealed an increasing interest among the Slovene biomedical community. Patrons have often complained to librarians about information overload and difficulty in following all the Web site’s enhancements. This situation called for a dynamic restructuring of the CMK Web site. Such problems are often solved with customisable and personalised library portals. Having limited financial and human resources, it was decided to customise and extend an existing library portal software solution (MyLibrary from North Carolina State University). The MyLibrary portal for the CMK was not only customised, but some important new functionality, most notably multilingual support, was added. This experience of developing a personalised library portal could be of interest to most libraries that offer information in at least two languages.