Librarians facing “global threats”: multilingual terminology and new cataloguing and information retrieval instruments

Which are the global threats that librarians have to face nowadays? Not the war against terrorism, or the proliferation of weapons of mass-destruction, but the ability to be strategic according to new library landscapes made of new information technologies and new skills in specific domains involving also knowledge in technical foreign languages. In the following paper we will present how two practical solutions have been adopted in order provide new instruments to the library to afford problems having a strong link to multilingual terminology and multicultural context. The first issue concerned the ‘standardization’ of new subject headings necessary to update the cataloguing process in a specific domain. The second was the effort to give to foreign students in international relations the opportunity to fully appreciate the local catalogue by means of a software interface leading them to the choice of the most appropriate subject term.