ALA-LC romanization explained

ALA-LC (American Library AssociationLibrary of Congress) is a set of standards for romanization, the representation of text in other writing systems using the Latin script.

Applications

The system is used to represent bibliographic information by North American libraries and the British Library (for acquisitions since 1975)^[1] and in publications throughout the English-speaking world.

The Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules require catalogers to romanize access points from their non-Roman originals.^[2] However, as the MARC standards have been expanded to allow records containing Unicode characters,^{[3] [4]} many cataloguers now include bibliographic data in both Roman and original scripts. The emerging Resource Description and Access continues many of AACR's recommendations but refers to the process as "transliteration" rather than "Romanization."^[5]

Scripts

The ALA-LC Romanization includes over 70 romanization tables.^[6] Here are some examples of tables:

• A Cherokee Romanization table was created by the LC and ALA in 2012 and subsequently approved by the Cherokee Tri-Council meeting in Cherokee, North Carolina. It was the first ALA-LC Romanization table for a Native American syllabary.^[7]
• The Chinese Romanization table used the Wade–Giles transliteration system until 1997, when the Library of Congress (LC) announced a decision to switch to the Pinyin system.^[8]

See also

• ALA-LC romanization for Russian
• Devanagari transliteration
• Romanization of Arabic
• Romanization of Armenian
• Romanization of Belarusian
• Romanization of Bulgarian
  • Romanization of Khmer Romanization of Georgian
• Romanization of Persian
• Romanization of Ukrainian
• Romanization of Urdu

References

1. "Searching for Cyrillic items in the catalogues of the British Library: guidelines and transliteration tables"
2. Agenbroad. James E.. Romanization Is Not Enough. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly. 5 June 2006. 42. 2. 21–34. 10.1300/J104v42n02_03. 218589002 .
3. McCallum. S.H.. MARC: keystone for library automation. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 24. 2. 34–49. 10.1109/MAHC.2002.1010068. 2002.
4. Aliprand. Joan M.. The Structure and Content of MARC 21 Records in the Unicode Environment. Information Technology and Libraries. 22 January 2013. 24. 4. 170. 10.6017/ital.v24i4.3381. free.
5. Seikel. Michele. No More Romanizing: The Attempt to Be Less Anglocentric in RDA. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly. 9 October 2009. 47. 8. 741–748. 10.1080/01639370903203192. 60695345.
6. Web site: ALA-LC Romanization Tables. Cataloging and Acquisitions. Library of Congress. 2 June 2014.
7. Web site: Cherokee Romanization Table. Cataloging and Acquisitions. Library of Congress. 2 June 2014. 2012.
8. Council on East Asian Libraries (CEAL) Pinyin Liaison Group. Final Report on Pinyin Conversion. Chinese Librarianship: An International Electronic Journal. March 2000. 9. 2 June 2014. 1089-4667.

External links

• ALA-LC Romanization Tables