The major authority record exchange partners (British Library, Library and Archives Canada, Library of Congress, National Library of Medicine, and OCLC) have developed a plan to allow the addition of non-Latin script data (also known as nonroman script data) to name authority records distributed as part of the NACO program.

The addition of non-Latin script data is scheduled to begin on July 13, 2008

 

Final report of the ALCTS Non-English Task Force

Queens Borough Public Library has done an automated retrospective conversion of their Russian and Ukrainian records and developed a tool for the same: MARC-Detrans.

This is a refinement of their earlier program: Cyril.

Apparently adds 880s for Cyrillic based on the existing transliterated fields.

"This deals with with Library of Congress procedures and workflows now that the Library has moved its processing of non-roman materials to its Voyager database.

PCC members will find the information in questions 3--6 relevant to matters of languages, dual fields, bi-directionality, spacing, and the eventual use of non-roman data in authority records."

All kinds of information about Unicode and computer programs

Karen S-Y blogs about the OCLC project to add non-roman cross references to authority records, based on data-mining of bibliographic records and the WorlCat Identities project

"As previously announced, the Library of Congress and its major authority record exchange partners (British Library, Library and Archives Canada, National Library of Medicine, OCLC, Inc.) have agreed to a basic outline that will allow for the addition of non-Latin script references on name authority records distributed as part of the NACO program (no earlier than April 2008). Additional details about this project are contained in a White Paper drafted to frame many of the issues related to future policies for cataloger-added references to authority records that will follow an automatic pre-population of the authority records from relevant bibliographic data."

2007 revision;  now available in PDF and XML versions

The Unicode Consortium has just announced a new FAQ page on "Display of Unsupported Characters"

"ALCTS has formed a Non-English Access Steering Committee that will be responsible for providing guidance and direction to the many groups identified for implementing recommendations in the report of the Task Force on Non-English Access. The group is chaired by Magda el-Sherbini of Ohio State University"

Instructions for using Connexion and non-Latin scripts.

This report of the ALCTS Task-Force on Non-English Access makes recommendations for the next steps to improve access to materials in languages other than English and scripts other than Latin. The report includes recommendations for specific actions concerning technical specifications, cataloging guidelines, continuing education, communication, and staffing.

Several working documents discussing how to make RDA less English-centric.

Blog mentions Non-English Access report

Blog entry mentions the Non-English Access report

Online form for commenting on the non-English access report

Web page for subscribing to the nonenglishaccess discussion list

Press release announcing the availability of the Non-English Access report