5/3/2006
No longer lost in transliteration — MadCat now displays foreign languages
Those searching for materials in non-Western European languages, such as Chinese, Arabic or Hebrew, no longer need to rely on English transliterations when searching in MadCat, the UW–Madison library catalog.
New scripts have been added to MadCat making it possible to show foreign resources in their native scripts as well as in Roman script.
| OCLC continues to add new features to WorldCat. Those using WorldCat can now add reviews, notes and tables of contents to existing records after setting up a personal account. This is part of OCLC's effort to enhance records with more information. A new tab will appear a the top of the full display page called "Add/View Comments" where the information can be entered. |
More than 140,000 local library resources published in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew or Greek now show catalog information both in native as well as Roman scripts.
Although most of the programming was developed by OCLC Online Computer Library Center, a worldwide organization of libraries, the ability to display languages based on Cyrillic characters have a homegrown background. UW–Madison Slavic Studies Librarian Victor Gorodinsky and DoIT Programmer Mark Foster developed conversion rules for showing Cyrillic-based scripts for titles already in MadCat. The libraries will share these programs with OCLC so the bibliographic information in Cyrillic can be added to more than 90,000 records worldwide.
In addition to viewing records in the vernacular, those searching in MadCat can now search by typing in the non-Roman characters. This new capability can be helpful when searchers need to find resources in one of these original scripts but do not know the transliteration.
Since keyboards in the United States are based on the Western European Roman alphabet, searchers need to tailor their keyboard to the foreign language. For more information about searching in foreign languages, visit http://madcat.library.wisc.edu/help/worldlanguages.htm .
The new scripts display best when using the Internet browser Mozilla Firefox, but settings can be changed in Internet Explorer to properly show the scripts.