Joshua Ferraro

This question was asked recently on the Koha list. Suppose you have a Chinese or Arabic collection, and you want your users to be able to search for items using the traditional script as well as the latin transliteration of that script. Here are some tips for making the most of Koha’s flexibility:

Using the Koha MARC editor, I did a bit of original cataloging for a Chinese language book. LibLime’s demo catalog runs UTF-8, so it can easily store and display any UTF-8 Characters. Here is the first record I created:

http://opac.liblime.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-MARCdetail.pl?bib=23717

You’ll notice that I used the 880 Linkage fields to add the Pinyin (Latin transliteration of Chinese) as specified in the MARC standard. The interesting bit is that although Koha does not yet understand how to treat the 880 $6 (which as far as I can tell is a true exception to the rule), a keyword search for the Pinyin does in fact bring up the record. (author and title won’t work however). So that’s good– not great, but good.

Notice that there are also Linkage entries in the 100 and 245 tags: it goes both ways. I understand how this could be used by the system to not only link the two for searching, but also to generate the proper rules of the associated 880 tag. Of course, understanding how it SHOULD work, doesn’t mean it does yet … but keep reading, it gets better, I promise.

One of the ways 880 can be used is for transliteration, that is, storing different ways to represent the same language. Now, here’s the problem with 880 in MARC: it’s far too limited for what I’d like you to be able to do. First, it doesn’t allow any fine distinctions for different ’scripts’. You can, in fact, specify the kind of script you’re linking but you only have the following choices:

(3 Arabic
(B Latin
$1 Chinese, Japanese, Korean
(N Cyrillic
(2 Hebrew
However, at least in Standard Mandarin, which I studied, there are no less than five ways to represent the language: Traditional Hanzi, Simple Hanzi, Pinyin, Yale and Wade-Giles (well, there’s also Zhuyinfuhao, which is mainly for youngsters). MARC is sadly lacking in that you can only provide a one-to-one mapping and thus only include two representation variations.

But let’s not stop there. In addition to there being lots of different ways to represent the Chinese language, there are also many ways to encode each representation. UTF-8 and Big-5 are two that come to mind. This is where most of the problem comes from in the first place: patrons are often at Latin keyboards that don’t have the characters needed to search in the language’s traditional script.

Here comes Koha to the rescue. First, have a look:

http://opac.liblime.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-MARCdetail.pl?bib=23719

What you are looking at is a record for a Chinese language book that I cataloged using Koha’s MARC editor after making several minor adjustments to the Koha MARC Framework. Without breaking any MARC rules, using local use fields, and using Koha’s ’search also’ feature, you can find that record using a keyword, author, or title search using ANY of UTF-8, Big5, pinyin, Yale, or Wade-Giles. But don’t stop there: you can add as many transliterations as you like. There is literally no limit. Oh … and feel free to leave those 880s in there… some day Koha will be able to handle them as well.

About the Author

Joshua Ferraro currently serves as official Release Manager for the Koha project. He is also LibLime's President, Technology. He has over eight years of experience working with open-source technology. Over the past six years he has worked to promote open source in libraries. His library-related research interests include cross-database searching, integrated library automation systems, data mining and web spidering.