Print

Print


***Please excuse cross-posting***

The Committee on Cataloging: Asian and African Materials (CC:AAM) invites you to join us for its ALA San Francisco annual conference session “Managing Transliteration of Bibliographic Data.”
The session is scheduled for Saturday, June 27, 2015  8:30am to 10:00am at Moscone Convention Center, 3010 (W) and features the following two presentations, moderated by Margaret Hughes, Metadata Librarian for Humanities, Social Sciences & Africana at Stanford University. For more information, please visit http://alaac15.ala.org/node/28690.
 
“Character encoding in Unicode, transliteration, and the future of multilingual search” - Deborah Anderson, Research Linguist, University of California-Berkeley
 
With the recent growth and widespread adoption of the international character encoding standard Unicode, multilingual text has become increasingly available on computers and mobile devices. However, over 100 modern minority and historical scripts are not yet in Unicode, making it difficult to locate text materials online.  In addition, support for many of the modern minority scripts on digital platforms and tools is still marginal, so finding materials in these scripts is severely hindered. In the library realm, transliteration remains a key tool to locate text materials and records in non-Roman scripts. However, ALA-LC Romanization tables only cover a limited number of languages, so accessing multilingual records is still hampered. This talk will report on the background and current work in encoding non-Roman scripts for Unicode, discuss transliteration, and suggest potential directions forward.
 
“Building Blocks for Accessing Multilingual Data: CLDR” - Steven Loomis, Technical Lead, IBM Global Foundations Technology Team
 
The Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) project collects language data which enables vendors to build software that supports the languages of the world. The latest release of CLDR contains full coverage for over modern 77 languages, with basic information on many other languages. CLDR data includes, for example, a list of the characters used by different languages, keyboards, transliteration rules, and translations of cultural and regionally conventions. In the librarians’ world, CLDR data could be leveraged to speed support for accessing and create, validate and order multilingual records, and provide keyboards, character pickers for various languages, and transliteration tools.  
 
Thank you for your interest. We look forward to seeing you there!
 
On behalf of CC:AAM,
Charles Riley, Yukari Sugiyama, and Iman Dagher