East Asian Collection

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Collection Guide	Chinese Electronic Resources	Video Collection
Rare Books	Romanization and Pinyin Conversion	Links

Searching for Chinese Resources in MadCat

If you are looking for Chinese titles in MadCat, you are advised to search in both Wade-Giles and Pinyin romanization systems in order to get comprehensive search results from the catalog. You are advised to do so until our local Pinyin conversion project is complete, that is, when all records of Chinese titles in MadCat are in Pinyin. This is because all titles cataloged after 1 October 2000 are in Pinyin romanization, while all titles cataloged before 1 October 2000 are in Wade-Giles romanization. All titles in Wade-Giles eventually will be converted into Pinyin.

Please read on if you are interested in the Pinyin Conversion Project…

Chinese Romanization Systems

What is Romanization?

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) are non-Roman languages. Romanization systems were developed originally with the purpose of indicating pronunciation of a non-Roman language to non-speakers. To romanize is to transcribe a non-Roman language into the Roman alphabet.

There are different systems of romanizing Chinese. And in the North American library world, romanization became both an easy alternative to displaying vernacular scripts and a tool for searching CJK online catalogs. Prior to year 2000, the romanization system adopted by the Library of Congress for Chinese was the Wade-Giles romanization system.

The Wade-Giles Romanization System

The Wade-Giles romanization system, originally used by Thomas F. Wade and Herbert. A. Giles, had been widely used in English publications until 1979, and by libraries in North America until October 2000.

The Pinyin Romanization System

Hanyu Pinyin, or Pinyin in short, was developed in China in the late 1950s. Pinyin has already been the standard for the US Government since the late 1970s, and it is also the standard used by the United Nations, institutes of higher education, and most of the Western world's media.

However, it was not until year 2000 that the Library of Congress officially adopted the Pinyin as a standard for romanizing Chinese, and a large-scale conversion project has been in place since then for changing over all its bibliographic records.

The Pinyin Conversion Project

Library of Congress' decision has significant ramifications for all North American libraries with Chinese collections. This conversion project is considered to be "the single largest conversion of romanization systems in the history of American libraries to date." Many technical issues have already been addressed, guidelines for cataloging Chinese materials have been updated, and changes in romanization aggregation have been proposed and adopted.

"Day One"

The three major organizations involved in this large-scale conversion project include the Library of Congress (LC), Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), and Research Libraries Group (RLG). The designated "Day One" of this conversion was October 1st 2000. Since then, all libraries in North America have switched over to Pinyin as the standard romanization for Chinese records and started cataloging in Pinyin only.

Conversion Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

All Wade-Giles records in our online catalog, MadCat, will be converted into Pinyin records. This conversion project will be scheduled either during the latter half of 2002 or the first half of 2003.

Additional Information on the Conversion Project

•Wade-Giles to Pinyin conversion table: http://madcat.library.wisc.edu/help/wadetopinyin.pdf
•Pinyin to Wade-Giles conversion table: http://madcat.library.wisc.edu/help/pinyintowade.pdf
•Library of Congress: http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/pinyin/
•Online Computer Library Center: http://www.oclc.org/oclc/pinyin/index.htm
•Research Libraries Group: http://www.rlg.org/eas/index.html