Chapter 8

Challenges for Globalised Information

Systems in a Multilingual and

Multicultural Context

Matthias Gortz, Thomas Mandl, Katrin Wernerand Christa Womser-Hacker

Abstract

Purpose – Global cooperation between and within organisations hasbecome essential for successful businesses. For the informationmanagement within such an international and necessarily multilingualenvironment, new challenges arise due to the diversity of thestakeholders and participants as well as due to the heterogeneity ofapproaches and traditions of information handling.

Design/methodology/approach – Key technologies like search technol-ogies need to be adapted to support content in multiple languages andefficient access to it. Information processes need to be analysed whilebearing in mind that problems may arise due to cross-culturalmisunderstandings. The diversity requires appropriate treatment andappropriate methods in information systems in order to improveinternational information flows.

Findings – This chapter identifies some of these challenges and showshow they can be approached from an information science perspective.User-oriented research at the University of Hildesheim in the areasinformation retrieval, information seeking and human–computerinteraction is presented.

Library and Information Science Trends and Research: Europe

Library and Information Science, Volume 6, 169–191

Copyright r 2012 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1876-0562/doi:10.1108/S1876-0562(2012)0000006011

170 Matthias Gortz et al.

Originality/value – Global enterprises and organisations may use thischapter to identify challenges and solutions for adapting theirinformation technology to an international scale. Researchers whowork on multilingual information access and intercultural aspects ofinformation systems get an overview on some current research.

Keywords: Information systems; multicultural; cooperation;multilingual

8.1. Introduction

Information science is built around the paradigm of user-orientation.Information and all processes concerning information are viewed from apragmatic perspective introduced by Kuhlen (1989). His formula ‘informa-tion=knowledge in action’ (Kuhlen, 1995, p. 34) has accompaniedgenerations of students throughout learning and beyond. It claims thatinformation is created in an active problem-solving context. For knowledgeto become information, a ‘refinement’ is required that creates a respectivevalue-add. Value-added knowledge, i.e. information, is defined by itsrecipient. In addition to the user-orientation, a constructive paradigm with astrong focus on empirical methods was central to the understanding ofinformation science at the University of Hildesheim. As such, informationscience is a discipline that does not only analyse, observe and describeinformational processes and systems but also takes a constructive role indesigning information systems. The research aims at the entire informationlife cycle and the usage context of information products and services.

Globalisation is a big challenge for managing information effectively,especially in multilingual and multicultural Europe. In the light of latestdevelopments towards a globalised economy and society, some key subjectsand methods of information science need to be adapted. Managinginformation is the foundation of a decision-based management of any typeof organisation and thus represents one of the main success factors fororganisational effectiveness and efficiency. In an increasingly internationaland hence intercultural context, organisations are faced with the challengeof how information may be managed successfully across linguistic andcultural barriers. Confronted with cross-border information and commu-nication processes, the postulate ‘context is key’ carries new weight. Thedegree of diversity within an organisation’s workforce or customerdemographics brings about new challenges regarding knowledge capturingand preparation, as well as information search and presentation. Today’sorganisations need to become aware of the implications of internationality,

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interculturality and multilinguality and take them into account withininformation management.

Information science research at the University of Hildesheim, Germany,has therefore focused on the impacts of these developments on informationbehavior (IB) and information retrieval (IR), human-computer interaction(HCI) and evaluation. It reveals possible options as to how to respond tosuch challenges regarding language and culture in the international context.This chapter will present current research activities and methods in order toindicate a trend of evolving scientific approaches for analysing this complexmatter. It furthermore identifies courses of action for the improvedmanagement of information in times of globalisation and internationalisa-tion in the areas of IR and HCI.

In order to provide a foundation for these insights into library andinformation science (LIS) trends as they are analysed at the Departmentof Information Science and Natural Language Processing at the Universityof Hildesheim and in order to add to the global discussion and definitionof information science, the first segment of this chapter will elaborate onour core discipline of information science, IR and HCI. The field of cross-language IR serves as a perfect example of the challenges and impacts of amultilingual and multicultural context for globalised information systems.The internationalisation of HCI will be discussed in the next section.

Widening the scope of IR research, the following section will then lay outfurther activities in the form of IB and user satisfaction studies as they are,too, heavily influenced by a diverse user population. Research activities andfindings in these fields lead to the overall consideration of how to designhuman–machine interfaces in a multilingual and multicultural context. Thisresearch trend will be presented in the section on international HCI. Finally,an outlook on further activities at the University of Hildesheim and futuretrends in LIS research in Europe is given.

8.2. Information Retrieval

Information retrieval (IR) systems allow access to large knowledgecollections and are a key technology for the information society. From aninformation science perspective, IR focuses on knowledge representationand the retrieval of information relevant to a specific user problem (Mandl,2009). Users consult IR systems like Web search engines or searchapplications in diverse situations of information need to support theirknowledge work and leisure interests. IB in front of retrieval systems isexpressed in brief statements (queries) of interest which are often formulatedwith insufficient knowledge about the topic. Queries as an expression of userinterest have been a subject of research which revealed many statistical

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patterns (Jansen & Spink, 2006), but also e.g. reformulation behaviourwhich reveals the uncertainty of users (Huang & Efthimiadis, 2009).

Current IR systems react to user queries which are typically composed ofa few words taken from a natural language. The query is compared todocument representations that were extracted during the indexing phase.The matching is based on natural language and the occurrence of querywords in the text is considered as evidence for the relevance of a document.The most similar documents are presented to the users who can interact withthem and who can evaluate their relevance with respect to their informationneeds and problems. The representation of a document in IR is based on thewords in the document and is, as a consequence, necessarily vague inrepresenting the content and meaning of the text. The process of extractingthe words describing the content is called indexing. During automaticindexing, algorithms assign representative words to documents. Indexingnatural language documents typically includes these steps (Mandl, 2009):

� Word segmentation: finding the boundaries between words, which is harde.g. for some Asian languages� Elimination of stop words: frequent words without meaning forthemselves and which are unlikely to be query words� Stemming: morphologically modified words (e.g. conjugations) aremapped to their basic form or their stem (e.g. runs - run, houses -house)

Due to the vagueness of the retrieval process, evaluation is of majorimportance. IR research has adopted an evaluation scheme which tries toignore subjective differences between users in order to be able to comparesystems and algorithms. The user is replaced by a prototypical and constantuser. Relevance judgments are carried out by domain experts who evaluatethe relevance of a document independent of subjective influences. Thisapproach is called the Cranfield paradigm. Research results show that theCranfield paradigm leads to reliable results for comparing systems (Buckleyand Voorhees, 2004).

8.2.1. IR in Europe

In the last decade, two developments can be observed in IR researchespecially in Europe: First, more emphasis is given to European languagesother than English, and second, the user perspective is more and moreconsidered to be a key to conduct valid research on information access. Aholistic perspective of retrieval processes within IB is adopted. Especially,the iterative and interactive nature of the information search process needs

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to be considered. Several user issues have been intensively researched. Forexample, prior domain knowledge and search expertise play an importantrole in the user behaviour (Liu, 2011). Jansen, Zhang, and Zhang (2007)studied the effect of branding on evaluations of system performance. In thisexperiment, the same result lists were integrated in the Web search engineinterfaces of Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo and one unknown, in-housesearch engine. The findings show that branding has an effect on user’sevaluations of system performance, which further implies that expectationsinfluence perception.

Such research requires additional methods for evaluation which need togo beyond the Cranfield paradigm and include users (Kelly, 2009).Specifically, user satisfaction and its relation to the prior expectations ofthe user is a recent topic of great interest and shows how intricate themethodological issues are. There is a diversity of approaches to measure usersatisfaction.

In the field of marketing science, the formation of customer satisfaction isdiscussed in terms of confirmation or disconfirmation of prior expectations.According to this so-called confirmation/disconfirmation paradigm, custo-mer satisfaction is achieved through a comparison between consumers’expectations and their perceptions of product and service quality (e.g.Cadotte, Woodruff, & Jenkins,1987; Patterson, 1993). Taking thisbehavioural paradigm and applying it to the context of search engine resultlists, we have been conducting a series of two studies at the University ofHildesheim to examine the influence of outcome expectancies and retrievalquality on user satisfaction and performance (cf. Lamm, Mandl, Womser-Hacker, & Greve, 2010a, 2010b). Both experimental designs involved themanipulation of system performance and user expectation as independentvariables in order to determine their influence on a set of dependentvariables, which in both cases included a user satisfaction questionnaire aswell as some effectiveness measures which intended to quantify userperformance. Although no statistical evidence for the confirmation/disconfirmation paradigm was found, the qualitative analysis of the firststudy gave some indication that the predicted relationship may indeed exist.Results of the second study basically supported the findings by Szajna andScamell (1993), who reported that unrealistic expectations tend to wear ofover time.

8.3. Human–Computer Interaction

In times of mobile and ubiquitous access to information, the design of theinterface between the user and the information system is of growingimportance. Usability generally defines to which degree a product or a

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system is easy to use. Usability encompasses the aspects of effective use,efficient use and subjective satisfaction. Good usability can be achieved bydesigning an interface with the user in mind and by applying testing methodsthroughout the development process where users take an active role. A largenumber of empirical methods are available mostly based on observing andquestioning users. While a user test provides more detailed and objectiveinformation, a questionnaire study can be carried out with less resources.Many research questions evolve around the evaluation of these facets inHCI. The selection of a specific method and its parameters cannot bededuced from the project and its status. Many rules of thumb are used inpractical evaluation work. Methods need to be adapted across cultures. Thestep from observations to a better interface requires much interpretation ofthe data and therefore much experience.

Coming from an information science perspective, it is important that theuser plays a central role within information processes, i.e. that HCI is reallyuser-centered and computers play a supporting role. In this sense, usabilityand user experience are very relevant issues. The first goals of softwareergonomics as paramount discipline are that users can communicate andinteract with systems in an intuitive and natural way. ‘Usability principlesare rooted in the human experience and not in technology’ says JakobNielsen during an interview by Pixelsurgeon in June 2012. This means thatusers can use their mother tongue and behavioural patterns they are used towhen interacting with any kind of machines or artefacts.

The goal of usability is to create systems which are easy and natural touse. Users do not have to invest high mental efforts, mistakes are rare and ifthey arrive not a big problem. This understanding of usability comprisesthree facets which are not necessarily correlated:

� Effectiveness: Can users achieve high-quality solutions with the interface?� Efficiency: Is the relationship between effort necessary and the solutionadequate?� Satisfaction: How satisfied are users subjectively with the system?

To evaluate usability many reliable guidelines and resources such aschecklists concerning ISO standards or heuristics exist (e.g. the Webusability heuristics outlined by Sutcliffe, 2002). They can be used to check oreven measure the quality of e.g. websites with usability principles. Userexperience is a notion which cannot be based on hard facts and for which atpresent no binding agreement exists. This stretches further than usabilityand covers all facets of users’ perception that result from prior use oranticipated use of a system, and includes users’ emotional attitudes as well asbeliefs and preferences and can be a consequence of the users’ internal state

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and of personality including the whole context of use (before, during andafterwards).

8.4. Integration of Cultural Aspects

When referring to cultural aspects in HCI, the concept of culture must beunderstood. In information systems, and cognitive and information sciencethere is a specific interpretation of culture. The main interest is to predicthow users with a certain cultural background will behave at certain stages ofthe information process. There are many different definitions. The one ofEdgar H. Schein (2010) considers culture as ‘a pattern of shared basicassumptions that a group learned as it solved its problems of externaladaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to beconsidered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correctway to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems’ Schein (2010,p. 18).

Especially, the Dutch anthropologist Geert Hofstede is often cited in theHCI context. He derives the meaning of culture from social anthropology.He defines it as learned pattern of ‘thinking, feeling, and potential acting’and ‘the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members ofone group or category of people from another’ (Hofstede & Hofstede, 2003).Culture is often illustrated by using the image of an onion: the most visibleouter layers are easier to access than the hidden inner core which is difficultto identify (Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner, 2011). Visible aspects areeasy to recognise for everyone, the invisible ways of thinking and behavingare much more difficult to access. This leads to many misunderstandingsin intercultural communication. For example, while the greeting behaviourcan be easily observed in a different culture, it is much more difficult tofind out how members of a certain culture deal with unavoidable uncertainsituations.

In 1991, Hofstede conducted a large-scale study at IBM involving116,000 employees in 53 different countries. As a result of his investigation,he developed five so-called cultural dimensions which build up a model todescribe the behaviour of members of particular cultures. Each culture isclassified in accordance to its relative position on a polar scale and gains aspecial score with each dimension. In this way, properties of culturaldimensions can be found out and compared quantitatively (Hofstede, 1991).The following cultural dimensions were proposed by Geert Hofstede:

� Power distance� Individualism vs. collectivism

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� Uncertainty avoidance� Masculinity vs. femininity� Long-term vs. short-term orientation

Power distance measures the extent to which subordinates (employees,students, etc.) accept inequality in power and authority distribution. In thecontext of learning for example, teachers in small power distance societiesare in the position of an expert, who conveys impersonal ‘truth’. In highpower distance cultures, teachers present knowledge as their personal‘wisdom’. As an authority they are expected to show learning paths tofollow.

The dimension individualism vs. collectivism focuses on the intensity ofties among individuals in a society. A difference can be observed concerningcommunication and debating. In collective cultures, students will only speakup when asked personally by the teacher and usually agree with collectivelyapproved opinions, as formal harmony has to be maintained. On thecontrary, individualist students will not be embarrassed to speak up in classin response to a general invitation by the teacher, and to express theirpersonal views, as controversial discussions and pluralism of opinions arefostered.

Uncertainty avoidance describes the extent to which individuals feeluncomfortable by uncertain or unknown situations. Cultures with weakuncertainty avoidance are characterised by the acceptance of risks andambiguous or new situations as a part of everyday life. In societies withstrong uncertainty avoidance, individuals will prefer structured situationswith precise objectives and details assignments.

Masculinity vs. femininity, these two extreme values of this dimensionfocus on the differences between the social roles attributed to men andwomen and the expected behaviour of the two sexes. Masculine values arerelated to competitiveness and assertiveness. Feminine values are related toharmony and quality of life.

Later in his research, Hofstede added a fifth dimension which wassuggested by Asian researchers: long-term vs. short-term orientation. Thisdimension refers to the attitude toward time. Short-term cultures prefer togain return on their investment quickly whereas long-term cultures arewilling to invest in future returns. Long-term cultures value tradition highlyand elders and experienced enjoy a high status.

Other cultural dimensions were modelled for example by Hall andTrompenaars. Hall (1966) has suggested the dimension of communicationstyle. Explicit communication style cultures are called low context cultures.They state important messages explicitly, people say directly what theymean, and communication is seen as an exchange of information. On theother hand, high context cultures rely much more on the context of the

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situation or the social environment. Social status and the private life ofpeople are important in any situation. Direct communication is regarded asimpolite and even aggressive. Many messages are conveyed through non-verbal signals or implicitly. The theoretical discussion about the complexconcepts of culture cannot be elaborated here in more detail.

8.5. Cross-Language Information Retrieval

Since Europe is especially rich in languages, the main issue is to meet theusers’ expectations concerning their language skills. Cross-languageInformation Retrieval (CLIR) aims to overcome language barriers withrespect to the user’s query, its representation, as well as the documentcollection by combining IR techniques with methods from machinetranslation and natural language processing. Both multilingual and cross-lingual IR are of relevance. The latter allows differing query and collectionlanguages so that German queries may lead to English results, for example.A growing body of research has been accumulated under the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF).

Multilingual or cross-lingual information retrieval is concerned with theretrieval of documents in other languages than the query language. This is ofimportance if the user has only passive knowledge of a language that enableshim to read a document. However, in many cases users lack the activeknowledge to formulate a good query. CLIR needs to bridge languageborders and applies several methods from natural language processing(NLP). Often, machine translation is used to translate the query. In thesecases, the translation quality is not the most important factor. In somesituations, even a low-quality translation may still lead to good retrievalresults. Other approaches include statistic transfer methods without anexplicit translation step. The transformation which most often includesautomatic translation tools suffers from translation issues like the lack of aunique equivalent of a word in another language. The quality of cross-lingualretrieval is typically at least some 5% worse in performance compared tomonolingual retrieval (Di Nunzio, Ferro, Mandl, & Peters, 2007; Foo, 2011).

CLEF is a large European evaluation initiative dedicated to cross-language IR for European languages. CLEF was implemented as aconsequence of the rising need for cross-lingual and multilingual retrievalresearch and applications. IT provides a multilingual test bed for retrievalexperiments. The evaluation resource comprises several components: Thecore of a retrieval evaluation resource is a data collection which is typically alarge set of documents, a set of the potential information needs of users(called topics) and corresponding judgements about documents and theirrelevance for a topic. Furthermore, the evaluation methodology comprises

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evaluation software packages, results of experiments, measures to compareresults and calculated results as well as statistics. Individual topics representinformation needs which typical users of retrieval might have.

The multilingual nature of the CLEF evaluation requires that relevantdocuments exist for each topic in several languages. An event needs to becovered in several newspapers in order to be eligible for a CLEF topic.CLEF has created evaluation resources for many languages (Agirre, DiNunzio, Ferro, Mandl, & Peters, 2009) including Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch,Finnish, French, Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese, Persian, Russian, Spanish,Swedish and German. These resources are available for long-term researchand are guiding the development and the optimisation of systems. Theresults of many years of CLEF have shown that systems need to bespecifically optimised for any language. Many good system configurationswere identified. It could be determined that the quality of bi- undmultilingual retrieval is consistently below monolingual performance. Theresults again differ between language pairs (Di Nunzio et al., 2007).

The large amount of evaluation data available also allowed a criticalperspective on the evaluation methodology in IR. The reliability of IR testshas been investigated from a variety of perspectives. One issue e.g. is therobustness of retrieval results which is of special importance for theevaluation of multilingual retrieval systems. Due to the large variancebetween topics which is typically much larger than the variance betweensystems, the question arises whether the current procedure of averagingover all topics is adequate. This neglects the high negative impact of low-performing queries on the user perception of the system.

The perspective of each individual user of an IR system is different fromthe perspective taken by an evaluation initiative. The users will bedisappointed by systems which deliver poor results for some topics whereasan evaluation initiative rewards systems which deliver good average results.A system delivering poor results for hard topics is likely to be consideredof low quality by a user although it may reach high average results.Evaluations emphasising this aspect are considered as evaluations of therobustness of systems. The evaluation of robustness emphasises stableperformance over all topics instead of high average performance. Even thesegood systems achieve only poor results for some topics. Improving on thesetopics would greatly enhance their overall quality as perceived by the user.This system behaviour can be better reflected in evaluation by using thegeometric mean of the average precision of all queries (GMAP) as a mainindicator for performance instead of the mean average precision (MAP)(Robertson, 2006).

An evaluation track for robust retrieval has been established at the TextRetrieval Conference (TREC). To perform well in this track is moreimportant for the systems to retrieve at least a few documents for difficult

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queries than to improve the performance in average (Voorhees, 2005). Therobust task is very user oriented because users often remember bad topicsbetter than positive experiences. For cross-language retrieval, a robust taskat CLEF was established. The robust task uses test collections previouslydeveloped at CLEF. These collections contain data in six languages (Dutch,English, German, French, Italian and Spanish) and approximately 1.35million documents (Di Nunzio et al., 2007).

A study of a large body of IR results from CLEF showed that measuringrobustness is very useful for multilingual retrieval because the results obtainedwith robust measures differ more from the traditional retrieval measurementsthan for monolingual retrieval (Mandl, Womser-Hacker, Di Nunzio, &Ferro, 2008). The rankings based on MAP and GMAP differ especially in themultilingual sub-task. It can be observed that some dramatic changes inranking position occur between rankings based on MAP and GMAP for themultilingual task. There is at most a weak correlation whereas there is ahigher correlation for the monolingual retrieval tasks. CLEF has paid furtherattention to the user perspective. An interactive task was conducted between2001 and 2009 which stressed the user interaction within multilingual searchenvironments and often relied on user testing (Gonzalo, Peinado, Clough, &Karlgren, 2010; Martl, Mandl, &Womser-Hacker, 2009).

Currently, information systems typically collect mass data about userinteractions which are an excellent source for the analysis of real userbehaviour. Log data constitute a relevant aspect in the evaluation process ofthe quality of a search engine and especially the quality of a multilingualsearch service. Log data can be used to study the usage of a search engine,and to better adapt it to the objectives the users were expecting to reach.Many publications of large Internet services are based on such collections;however, these data are typically not publicly available. The CLEF trackLogCLEF intends to make log files more accessible and enable comparativeresearch with the same data. The success of comparable corpora andresources needs to be transferred to log data. All researchers are enabled towork with real-world log data now and the output of algorithms and theanalysis of user behaviour can be compared and verified.

LogCLEF was initiated in 2009 and was in its third edition in 2011. Thebasic goal is the analysis and classification of queries in order to understandsearch behaviour in multilingual contexts and ultimately to improve searchsystems. The research goals are the analysis and classification of queries, thedefinition of success of a search in order to understand search behaviour inmultilingual contexts. Potential tasks for analysis included the explorationof the relationship between language of the query, origin of the user, selectedinterface language and language of library viewed or the determination oflanguage changes occurring within user sessions (Mandl et al., 2010a;Mandl, Di Nunzio, & Schulz, 2010b).

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The LogCLEF multilingual log analysis evaluation initiative has createdthe first long-term standard collection for evaluation purposes in the area oflog files. One large log of activities from The European Library (TEL)search service is provided for research. This service provides access toseveral national libraries of Europe. Users and content come from manylanguages. The ‘Deutscher Bildungsserver’ is a quality-controlled Internetdirectory for educational resources mainly for German users. A raw serverlog representing three months of activities on the portal is made available(Mandl, 2009; Mandl et al., 2010a). For LogCLEF 2011, a one-month log ofthe Chinese search engine Sougu was added and it allows comparisonsbetween Web search and user behaviour in digital libraries like theBildungsserver and TEL (Di Nunzio et al., 2011b).

The major topics of interest at LogCLEF 2010 were named entities inqueries, language identification of queries, determining successful searches,and comparing search behaviour between Web search and search in TELdata. Language identification within queries of a log file is a difficult taskbecause of the short text available, the missing context in queries and thatnamed entities can lead to misclassifications. For example, ‘Mozart’ may beclassified as a German query, but can also be a query in many other differentlanguages. Within TEL data more than half of the queries represent searchesfor named entities. This fact has a huge impact on the correct languageidentification for the queries (Di Nunzio et al., 2011a).

Leveling, Ghorab, Magdy, Jones, and Wade (2010) investigated therelation between query language, interface language and user IP address.They showed that these aspects correlate and this information can be used toautomatically generate a ranking of document collections that better reflectsuser preferences. In addition, they examined query performance indicatorsfor Web search and applied them to queries in sessions to find out ifperformance of user queries increases over time. They found that there areonly few consistent changes in consecutive queries on the same topic.However, the first query in a session seems to indicate behaviour in theremainder of the search session: long initial queries seem to be improvedby removing terms, while initially short queries will be expanded (Levelinget al., 2010).

A recent analysis has shown most users search with the language of thecountry of their IP. English is an exception because it represents the defaultinterface language which is often not modified. In the other cases where theinterface language was modified, there are interesting relations. ForGerman, e.g. we found that of some 2000 users who used a German IP,some 1900 used the system in the interface language German. For only 700of their queries though, the language identification software identified thequery as German. This shows the difficulties of language identification inthis application due to short texts and high percentage of named entities.

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The same analysis for Italian showed that 94% of the users who used Italianas interface language access the system from an Italian IP whereas the samenumber for French is only 74%.

Future analysis can focus on the cases where the language of the query,the IP origin and the interface language are different. Such a study canreveal how a system like TEL is used in the multilingual environment of theWeb and what the language access patterns of users are. In LogCLEF 2011,the language aspect was investigated in relation to potential successindicators (Di Nunzio et al., 2011b). Other participants of LogCLEFcompared the behaviour of users on TEL to the typical behaviour in generalWeb search and found interesting results (Di Nunzio et al., 2011a).LogCLEF has been an important step in moving evaluation initiativesforward to deal with user-oriented topics.

8.6. International Human–Computer Interaction

The cultural aspects of HCI can be associated with user experience becausethey are very personal properties of individual users. It can be postulatedthat people with different cultural backgrounds use different ways in HCIand have different expectations and behavioural patterns. Consideringcultural aspects in interface design will lead to more usable systems andbetter-designed products because users feel more comfortable if the systemsare adapted to their culture. Many authors in this research field recognisethe importance of considering cross-cultural issues with respect to userinterface design (Evers, Sturm, Moreno Rocha, Cambranes Martinez, &Mandl, 2007). In 1996, Nielsen argued that ‘a system must match the user’scultural characteristics. This goes beyond simply avoiding offensive icons; itmust accommodate the way business is conducted and the way peoplecommunicate in various countries’ (Nielsen & Lagrange, 1996). This is achallenging task to meet these demands, because first of all cultural valueshave to be identified and transferred into applicable units. Besides, theWestern oriented definition of usability has to be undergone a criticalexamination when being transferred to other cultural backgrounds(Frandsen-Thorlacius, Hornbæk, Hertzum, & Clemmensen, 2009).

To adapt interfaces to special cultures and markets, two general strategieshave evolved. Localisation and globalisation build up the poles on a scale.Localisation is understood as ‘the process of adapting and translating asoftware application into another language in order to make it linguisticallyand culturally appropriate for a particular local market’ (Esselink, 1998,p. 2). It comprises the translation of all textual parts on the graphical userinterface (GUI) as well as to transfer non-textual materials. Obviouselements like character sets, icons, symbols, error messages, colours, reading

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directions, measurement units, formats, etc. have to be adapted. Reposi-tories were developed to provide access to the characteristics of cultures.Less obvious elements are metaphors, workflows and navigation, humour,etc. Currently, these elements cannot be handled by automatic systems.Companies and organisations are dealing with this problem by hiringcultural experts which is expensive and time-consuming. The concept ofglobalisation is more related to sales and marketing context and takes intoaccount several similar cultures and develops a common solution for all ofthem, e.g. for the whole Asian market. Within the usability engineeringprocess, a special strategy or combination has to be chosen.

From a scientific point of view, the question is if the cultural dimensionsproposed, e.g. by Hofstede, are reflected within informational communica-tion processes via user interfaces and if the results of these researchers maybe useful for an optimised HCI. There was a lot of criticism concerning theHofstede dimensions (Hofstede & Hofstede, 2003) but it was also recognisedthat Hofstede was the first in developing a quantitative-oriented culturalmodel. For HCI purposes, Hofstede’s dimensions were often selected.Although Marcus and West Gould (2000) argued that there may be acommon Internet culture caused by global economy, they transferredHofstede’s cultural dimensions to the design of Web interfaces. Theyillustrated as an example that information access on websites could be highlyvs. less highly structured. In their opinion, this could reveal a reference tothe uncertainty avoidance dimension. Another example is given by focusingon expertise, authority, certifications, official stamps or logos which may bean indicator for power distance. All of these findings are mostly based onexamples and often there is more than one explication.

In a later work, Marcus and Baumgartner (2005) presented a practical setof cultural dimensions for global user-interface design. In a survey, theycollected opinions about the most important dimensions from more than 50experts in HCI. Much earlier, Barber and Badre coined the notion of‘culturability’ (Barber & Badre, 1998) referring to culture and usability.They propose a two-level approach to mirror the needs of a target useraudience. In a first step, surface features like translation, currency, measuresand so on should be adjusted whereas a second step should involve theaesthetic appeal, images, colours, logic, functionality and communicationpatterns.

Sun (2001) conducted a study to find out if users with different culturalbackgrounds realise cultural difference on websites and prefer differentmodes of cultural markers.

This is a very challenging task because there are many vague inferencesinvolved. First of all, somebody’s ‘cultural background’ is not static overyears but can be adapted depending on complex circumstances. To identifycultural differences exactly would require an artificial baseline which does

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not exist. People are rooted in their own culture and it is very hard to reflectabout this objectively. Furthermore, culture is not the only influencingfactor. Gender, social status or personal characters, which are oftenconnected in some way, have to be included.

Making the shift to usability and user experience valid principles must beestablished with respect to the cultural background. As Frandsen-Thorlacius et al. (2009) could show for Danish and Chinese users, there isa change in priority concerning usability criteria. Effectiveness and efficiencyonly showed up as important factors concerning the Danish users whereasthe Chinese users focused on satisfaction and joy of use, i.e. before ratingusability of websites a fitting catalogue of usability principles must bederived.

Following the goal of a multicultural usability study in the context of aninformation system a valid principle of usability has to be built up in a firststep. This requires observation and analysis of user interaction. From aninformation science point of view these approaches are to be related to IB tofind out if culture-bound characteristics lead to different patterns in dealingwith information. User tests, questionnaires and surveys have to be appliedwithin the underlying application context.

Heimgartner (2007) developed a tool for deriving cultural differences fromHCI systems. He proposed some parameters related to information(Heimgartner, 2007, p. 345). The application context was a navigation systemand Chinese and German users were compared. The variables which wereexamined were the position of informational units and the different timeintervals. It turned out that Chinese and German users of navigation systemshad different preferences in the spatial arrangement of informational unitsand also in the time distance of presenting information. Web pages which maybe called ‘overloaded’ in a Western cultural style may be characteristic ofChinese culture. Also, a much higher information density regarding space andtime seems to be acceptable and even preferred by Chinese users.

Although there are many studies comparing two or more cultures, manyopen questions remain for design details. First of all, it seems to beimportant to step into the target culture to get first insights of users’information and interaction behaviour with a different cultural background.An interesting approach was proposed by Chavan (1998). He looked on thelast years’ hit products of a certain culture to observe social conventions andcultural lifestyles with the goal to derive design preferences. Second, culturalcontext and demographic data were collected to gain insights into the social,political and economic development of a country. In a final step, theparameter values of the cultural dimensions were also included, i.e. a certainculture is captured by different starting points which can reflect the fact thatcultures are no stable constructs but very much underlying social and alsotechnical change.

184 Matthias Gortz et al.

8.7. Information Behaviour

As the previous sections of this chapter have shown, a multilingual andmulticultural user environment – particularly present in Europe – challengesthe way IR systems and HCIs are designed. In order to meet thesechallenges, effective methods for modelling the context of interaction andmeasures for evaluating the perception of system performance need to bedeveloped. These aspects are addressed by the interdisciplinary fields of IBand user satisfaction research. The former pays tribute to the fact that therelevance of a retrieved document and the user-friendliness of a systeminterface are always relevant to the user and his/her context of use. Thus, therespective information system needs to be seen as one information sourceamong others, which might stand at the very beginning or end of a series ofuser interactions. This more global research perspective is characteristic forinformation seeking behaviour. It considers ‘[y] the purposive seekingfor information as a consequence of a need to satisfy some goal. In the courseof seeking, the individual may interact with manual information systems (suchas a newspaper or a library), or with computer-based systems (such as theWorld Wide Web)’ (Wilson, 1999, p. 49).

In the past 10 years, studies on IB in information science have gainedin importance (Fisher, Erdelez, & McKechnie, 2005). They extend theprimarily system-driven perspective of IR in computer or library andinformation science with a cognitive level of observation, which does notprimarily focus on the system (and thus mechanisms for the exploration,retrieval and processing of information) but the users (Ingwersen & Jarvelin,2005). From this research perspective, several models of IB have beendeveloped over the past 20 years. They aim at analysing procedural aspectsas well as influence factors of how individuals or groups deal withinformation and chose specific information sources for this purpose. As hasbeen shown by a variety of studies in the field of HCI and e-learning, theconsideration of the cultural background of a user plays a crucial role whendesigning user-friendly interfaces and learning processes. When it comes tothe field of IB, this aspect has so far been given little attention. Previousinformation seeking research on the interaction of different factors such astask complexity, type of information, source characteristics, etc. and theirinfluence on IB so far widely subsume the aspect of culture under ‘personal’or ‘demographic’ factor (Bystrom, 1999; Bystrom & Jarvelin, 1995). Athorough evaluation of the role of an individual’s cultural background forIB processes and the use of information sources is so far lacking.

Parallel to the progression of IR research in the years 1960–1980, the fieldof IB has analysed information search behaviour in the institutional context(the library). Dervin and Nilan (1986) criticised that the studies thatemerged during this time were limited in their perspective on the library

Challenges for Globalised Information Systems 185

context and its information systems. Accordingly, the focus of such studieschanged in the following years and was directed primarily to the human userand his behaviour (Ingwersen & Jarvelin, 2005, p. 55). The ‘sense-making’approach, which was developed by Dervin (1983, 1992) in the followingyears, reveals that the perspective of IB research advanced towards a holisticconsideration of the user in a general problem-solving context.

While ‘information search behaviour’ considers the specific interaction ofa user with a system for the purpose of retrieving information for a searchtask, IB is concerned with system-independent IB. This scientific field iscoined by a multitude of process-oriented models of IB (Cheuk, 1998;Kuhlthau, 1991; Marchionini, 1995), other studies from Bystrom andJarvelin (1995); Leckie, Pettigrew, and Sylvain (1996); and Bystrom (1999)are less focused on the sequential but rather the analytical perspective onIB and its influence factors (e.g. task complexity, work role, type ofinformation need, situational and personal, but also organisational factors).The findings of the later point to the fact that it still lacks a holisticunderstanding of the user and his/her characteristics in order to preciselymodel and predict an individual’s behaviour when looking for informationor solving a problem.

The role of cultural traits or dimensions for the behaviour of individualsor groups in the interaction with user interfaces or learning has been subjectto a variety of studies – as e.g. at the University of Hildesheim (Kamentz &Womser-Hacker, 2003; Mandl & de la Cruz, 2009; Schmitz, Mandl &Womser-Hacker, 2008). IB research has addressed this matter partially infew studies. There have been first theoretical arguments that the culturalidentity of a user may influence his/her choice of IB strategies. Komlodi andCarlin (2004) developed the hypothesis that cultural differences along thecultural dimensions of ‘power distance’, ‘individualism/collectivism’, and‘uncertainty avoidance’ (cf. Hofstede, 1991) as well as ‘speed of messages’,‘high and low context’ and ‘information flow dimensions and action chains’(cf. Hall, 1976) influence IB. The authors transfer these concepts into thecontext of the IB model developed by Marchionini (1995) and expect strongand weak influences on the respective process phases of the model. Thesehypotheses, however, still lack empirical proof. Duncker (2002) analysed thelibrary metaphor in the Maori culture and usability problems of Maori andtheir interaction with Western library information systems. The difficultiesresulting from cultural misconceptions, e.g. with the classification system,reveal that cultural differences may also apply to this context of use, generalconclusions in regards to existing information seeking models, however,cannot be drawn so far.

Ultimately, a study by Iivonen and White (2001) discloses the potential ofempirical studies in regards to cultural background and its influence on IB.The authors analyse the difference between Finnish and North American

186 Matthias Gortz et al.

Internet users in a mixed approach of quantitative and qualitative methods.They analyse the choice of information sources (direct access, catalogue,search engine) in confrontation with different question types (open/closed,foreseeable/unforeseeable source of answer) and observe significant differ-ences between the two user populations. These findings, however, are not ledback to specific cultural dimensions or even analytical connections withexisting process models.

8.8. Outlook

Information science has seen a dramatic enhancement of its topics in the lastdecades. Technological advances as well as societal developments like theglobalisation have modified the way people and organisations interact withinformation. In the future, research needs to adopt a holistic perspective onthe challenges presented in this chapter. HCI and multilinguality ininternational information processes should be jointly considered. Theresearch at the University of Hildesheim will approach the influence factor‘culture’, especially from the perspective of IB. Expertise in interculturalcommunication as well as information science is simultaneously required.Looking back on the above described development within informationscience towards a cognitive perspective on the user in a specific problem-solving process, questions like the following ones will be examined:

� What influence does the cultural background have on IB with respect tothe choice of information sources, the use of information and the transferof information?� May the hypothesis defined by Komlodi and Carlin (2004) regarding thecultural dimensions and their interrelation with the IB model byMarchionini (1995) be validated.� Which of the existing IB models best takes into consideration theinfluence of culture on user behaviour and which supplements arerequired?

The analysis of these research questions that are central to IB research ina multilingual and multicultural context such as Europe is currently beingdeveloped at the University of Hildesheim. The employment of quantitativeresearch methods (such as online studies at universities’ different culturalsettings) allows for complementing existing qualitative studies on models ofIB with empirical data regarding the choice of information sources inrespective process phases (Gortz, 2011). The resulting holistic view on IBenables the analysis of the factor ‘culture’ and its influence on a variety of

Challenges for Globalised Information Systems 187

aspects of information search, such as the process, the source, the usage andthe transfer of information.

The broader scope of research as a result of the globalised informationprocesses will affect information science as a discipline. This chaptershowed how research has adopted some of the current challenges and howglobalisation requires new approaches and methods for informationscience. Further changes will modify the information industry and newtrends will shape the information environments of individuals. Faced withthese diverse challenges, information science will need to reconsider itsbasic concepts and tasks as discipline. Despite the diversity of approachesand topics which will be dealt with at different schools all over Europe, itis essential to agree on the basic understanding of information science. Thisgoal can only be reached on a European level. Organisational structures inEurope need to be strengthened in order to be able to cope with theseupcoming tasks.

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