We noticed that the export of our metadata from OMP to other platforms (such as Thoth and OAI) contains mistakes in the language field.
Specifically, as far as Thoth is concerned, we observed that it detects the language of the content declared in the Proposal entry, and not the “Language” field that appears in the last Publication section. We were wondering why this last field was conceived, if it has no effect in the metadata export.
Additionally, since we have publications in more than the two languages that we would like to offer for the whole website layout (language of the press, in our case Italian, and English), we don’t know where to add “optional” languages for specific books. This problem is concerns our main series in OMP and not OJS or specific book series (for which the platform provides a separate website, with languages fields tailored to the specific journal or series).
For this reason, we are unsure on how to proceed. Any possible solution seems to present problems:
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if we consider the “Italian” section of the metadata entries as the original language section, we see under the Italian side of the website content which is not in Italian; additionally, in the case of books written in English, we would have to insert the English version twice (both in the “Italian” side and the “English”).
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if we consider the “Italian” section of the metadata entries as the Italian section, we would have to add another language, but in the metadata export on Thoth, the detected abstract would always be in Italian, even if the book is in French.
We also have more general questions on the best practices concerning languages and metadata: is it better to offer more translations of the metadata (in our case, Italian + English + evetual original language) or less multilingual, but more accurate metadata (only in English in the case of books written in English) - in the sense that the export will always be correct?
Here are two screenshots of the metadata of one of our books in English, how it appears in the Thoth export and our metadata on PKP’s OMP
