Bibliographic control of foreign languages: the case of displaying Cyrillic characters in online catalog at the University of Florida

Abstract

Libraries hold foreign language collections that include non-Roman alphabets (e.g., Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Japanese, etc.). Students are faced with challenges when they wish to access these publications due to transliteration schemes that have been used for many decades. While there are various different transliteration systems in the world, the American libraries use the Library of Congress system. The libraries’ integrated systems could only display the Romanized text in bibliographic records. This creates barriers for students to access, for example, Russian publications in online catalogs. Today, there is a new universal multi-script character set, International Standard ISO/IEC 10646 – the Unicode. The Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit organization that coordinates Unicode's development, has the ambitious goal of eventually replacing existing character encoding schemes with Unicode and its standard Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) schemes, as many of the existing schemes are limited in size and scope and are incompatible with multilingual environments. This standard, if implemented in the library system, enables not only to convert Romanized bibliographic data into a linguistically accurate display in the original alphabet but also users would be able to search and print in non-Roman scripts. Libraries are slowly implementing systems based on this new standard. There are some crucial issues that involve Unicode implementation in the libraries. What are the solutions for multiple languages in library systems? The University of Florida holds collections in several non-Roman scripts. As Slavic Studies specialist, my attention has focused on integrating records for Russian into the main OPAC, which now includes over 10,000 bibliographic records for monographs in original Russian alphabet.