On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, John Clews wrote:
> >
> > Any material that is already encoded according to 639-2:1998 will
> > have to be changed by splitting "smi" into "smi" and "sme". It is
> > correct that the majority of the items that use "the old smi" will
> > need to be changed to "the new sme", and a smaller number of items
> > will keep "the new smi". However, in the large picture we are
> > talking about very few records, and I would think that the errors
> > will be smaller this way. Making the oposite change would result in
> > non-Northern Sami records being erroneously encoded as Northern Sami.
>
> That provides the useful rationale for the need to change codes in
> most cases.
>
> It may be useful to warn libraries, via email lists (mounted by ISO,
> IFLA and others) that they will need to check and make changes at the
> appropriate time, otherwise the existing "smi" code will be wrong.
>
> Rebecca and Glenn, as you deal with large bibliographic files which
> may contain such Northern Sami records which would need to be recoded
> manually, will you be able to provide guidance to users on which
> codes should be allocated? This reallocation would not simply be
> possible by a global search/replace operation as would exist for
> changing "cam" to "khm" etc.
When we add a new language code for something previously covered by a
group code we generally do NOT go back and look at the records and
change any that covered that new language. We just accept that before a
certain date you might have to search a collective code. Noone has time
for this, and in addition it may not even be readily apparent from the
record. And certainly noone has time to go look at the material. Not with
the millions of records created each year.
Rebecca
>
> Alternatively, Haavard, may you and the National Library in Oslo, or
> any of the Sami language agencies, be able to provide a list of Sami
> records (with "sme" and "smi" properly allocated) for bibliographic
> users of ISO 639-2 to check their holdings against?
>
> Best regards, and thanks again
>
> John Clews
>
> --
> John Clews, SESAME Computer Projects, 8 Avenue Rd, Harrogate, HG2 7PG
> tel: +44 1423 888 432; fax: + 44 1423 889061;
> Email: [log in to unmask]
>
> Committee Chair of ISO/TC46/SC2: Conversion of Written Languages;
> Committee Member of ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC22/WG20: Internationalization;
> Committee Member of CEN/TC304: Information and Communications
> Technologies: European Localization Requirements
> Committee Member of TS/1: Terminology (UK national member body of
> ISO/TC37: Terminology)
> Committee Member of the Foundation for Endangered Languages;
> Committee Member of ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC2: Coded Character Sets
>
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