What a Difference a Default Setting Makes Te Taka Keegan, Sally Jo Cunningham University of Waikato, Computer Science Department, Hamilton, New Zealand {tetaka, sallyjo} @cs.waikato.ac.nz Abstract. This paper examines the effect of the default interface language on the usage of a bilingual digital library. In 2005 the default interface language of a bilingual digital library was alternated on a monthly basis between Māori and English. A comprehensive transaction log analysis over this period reveals that not only did usage in a particular language increase when the default interface language was set to that language but that the way the interface was used, in both languages, was quite different depending on the default language. Keywords: Log Analysis, Multi-Language Access 1 Introduction Recent research on multi-language digital libraries has focused on cross-language information retrieval (CLIR)—retrieving documents written in one language through a query in a different language [1]. In this paper we consider a specific bi-language DL—the Niupepa 1 collection—and examine how the default language setting of the DL interface affects usage. We base our conclusions on the analysis of a year’s site traffic and identify patterns in usage. 2 The Niupepa Digital Library Collection The Niupepa DL (www.nzdl.org/niupepa) makes available a collection of historic Māori newspapers published between 1842 and 1933 [2]. It is a major source of historic texts of the indigenous Māori people of Aotearoa/New Zealand—just over 35,000 newspaper pages, covering 40 titles. The Niupepa DL consists of 19,106 newspaper pages written in Māori, 15,696 newspaper pages written in parallel Māori and English, 680 newspaper pages written in English, 313 English Abstracts summarizing 10 of the periodicals written in Māori, and 22 bibliographic commentaries. The newspaper pages themselves are made available as a preview image, a full size image and as a text document that has been extracted by OCR. 1 Niupepa–Māori for newspaper