[Asis-l] Wisconsin Chapter Presentation

[Wooseob Jeong]

Dear members, 
The Wisconsin Chapter of ASIST are inviting you to the following presentation. 




THE PINYIN CONVERSION PROJECT AND THE CHALLENGE OF CLEANING UP AFTERWARD

by Philip Melzer (Vice-President/President-Elect, Council of East Asian Libraries, Team Leader, Korean/Chinese Cataloging Team, Library of Congress)



Time: 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm, March 28, 2005

Location: Bolton 289, School of Infomration Studies, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee



[Abstract]



Romanization is the transliteration of non-roman scripts (such as Japanese, Thai or Russian) into roman letters.  Through the use of romanization, we are able to file and index non-roman information in our library catalogs.

 

In the year 2000, American libraries converted from the Wade-Giles to the pinyin system of romanization of the Chinese language, to come into conformance with the worldwide standard.  With the support of the nation's libraries and library organizations, the bibliographic utilities, OCLC and RLG, developed machine programs to convert romanized Chinese text in 158,368 name authority records and over 3,000,000 Chinese bibliographic records.  Even the smallest libraries were affected by the conversion project, which touched on every aspect of cataloging - the MARC record, authority records, personal names, subject headings, classification schemes.  

 

This massive effort - the largest conversion of data in libraries since the adoption of AACR2 in 1981 - was accomplished through extensive consultation and cooperation between the Library of Congress, RLG, OCLC, libraries and library organizations throughout the country.

 

The presentation will describe the planning of the project, the mechanics of the conversion, some of the complexities that had to be dealt with, and the challenge of finding and converting romanized Chinese text on non-Chinese and premarc cataloging records.




==============================
Wooseob Jeong
Assistant Professor
School of Information Studies
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Milwaukee, WI 53201
TEL: (414) 229-6167
FAX: (414) 229-4848
Email: wjj8612 at uwm.edu

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.asis.org/pipermail/asis-l/attachments/20050311/cfa2e905/attachment.html