This paper presents the background, research design, and current progress of a new project on exploring the application of various machine translation strategies working toward multilingual information access for digital collections.

This study proposes a test topic generation framework through an analysis of existing literature. The framework contains three components, including a list of questions for eliciting users' information needs, a mechanism for topic generators to interact with the document collection, and a list of criteria to assess the quality of generated test topics. An application of this framework for generating test topics for a collection of library metadata records is presented.