[Mendele] Mendele Personal Notices and Announcements --Spielberg Library now searchable by Yiddish characters

[Victor Bers]

________________________________

Mendele Personal Notices and Announcements

July 4, 2012

To minimize wear and tear on the untershames, three requests:

1. Send time-sensitive notices well in advance.

2. Send material as plain text:  no HTML, other coding,or
attachments;and write MENDELE PERSONALS in the subject line.

3. Correspond directly with the person who or organization which has
posted the notice, *not* with your ever-beleaguered untershames.

____________________________________________________________________________________

From: Joshua Price JPrice at bikher.org
Date: July 3, 2012
Subject: Spielberg Library now searchable by idishe oysyes

The Yiddish Book Center’s Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, a
fast-growing collection of online Yiddish books, is now searchable in
Yiddish (Hebrew) characters.

The non-profit Yiddish Book Center began digitizing Yiddish books in
1997.  In 2009 it placed 11,000 volumes online, free of charge,
through the Internet Archive (www.yiddishbooks.org).  Those books have
since been downloaded 300,000 times.

Until now, however, the Spielberg Library has been searchable only in
“romanization,” or transliterated English characters.  That’s proved
frustrating for users abroad, for whom the Center’s Library of
Congress transliteration is far from intuitive.

Now, for the first time, new technology will allow users to search for
Yiddish books in their original alphabet.  For example, a reader
seeking a work by Sholem Asch, a best-selling Yiddish writer of the
last century, will no longer have try out variant spellings such as
“Asch,” “Ash,” or “Asz”; a single search for אש will turn up
everything.

To make the search process even easier, the Center has added a
“virtual Yiddish keyboard” to its standard search page
(www.yiddishbookcenter.org/books/search). You can also enter Yiddish
characters directly from your keyboard if you have software that makes
this possible.

Because of inconsistencies in Yiddish orthography – Yiddish spelling
wasn’t standardized until well into the 20th century – the Center has
removed diacritical marks (pasekh, komets, dekhele, and pintele) from
atop and beneath the letters.  Yiddish alphabet searching is available
for author, title, and keyword.  Romanized searching remains available
as well.

For details, please see the explanations in About the book search tool
(http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/about-book-search-tool).

For further information, technical or otherwise, please contact Josh
Price at jprice at bikher.org.
_________________________________________________________

Please do not use the "reply" key when writing to Mendele. Instead,
direct your mail as follows:

Responses to Mendele Personal Notices & Announcements should be sent
directly to the person whom or organization which posted the item.


Material for posting in Mendele Personal Notices
&announcements,typically ,announcements of events, commercial
publications, and questions not of general interest to the
membership,should be sent to:

    victor.bers at yale.edu (IMPORTANT! in the subject line write
"Mendele Personal")


Material for postings to Mendele Yiddish literature and language,
i.e,inquiries and comments of a non-commercial or publicity nature:and

likely to interest the membership in general, should be sent to


     mendele at mailman.yale.edu

IMPORTANT:  Please include your full name as you would like it to
appear in your posting.  No posting will appear without its author's
name. Submissions to regular Mendele should not include personal email
addresses, as responses will be posted for all to read.  They must
also include the author's name as you would like it to appear.

In order to spare the shamosim time and effort, we request that
contributors adhere, when applicable, as closely as possible to
standard English punctuation, grammar, etc. and to the YIVO rules of
transliteration into Latin letters. A guide to Romanization can be
found at this site:

http://www.yivoinstitute.org/about/index.php?tid=57&aid=275

All other messages should be sent to the shamosim at this address:

mendele at mailman.yale.edu

Mendele on the web: http://mendele.commons.yale.edu/

_____________________________