[Yulpub] East Asian languages in Orbis: Information for YUL public services staff

[Ellen Hammond]

Dear All,
I am copying below a message sent to East Asian studies faculty, staff, and 
students and Yale.  This will help you understand some of the changes in 
Orbis that relate to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language support and 
also our recommendations about using (or not using) features in the new 
version 5.0.  I hope that you can look through this message and be prepared 
to refer readers looking for East Asian materials to the East Asia Library 
home page (link provided) where a full explanation of these issues is now 
posted.  In the meantime, if you need clarification of the information 
presented here or on our home page, please contact Tao Yang, EAL Public 
Services Library (tao.yang at yale.edu).

Thank you very much & happy holidays.
Ellen



Copied Text:

Between December 27 and January 2, Orbis will function in "read-only" mode 
(for searching, but not requests, renewals, etc.) while a system upgrade 
takes place. On January 3, the new version of Orbis will become available, 
one that offers significantly improved support for East Asian 
languages.  Some of the improvements include:

1)  The display of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) characters in the 
"brief view" of records (until now, only the "long view" had CJK display)

2)  The ability to search using CJK characters (but see caveats below)

3)  The ability to export CJK characters to citation management programs 
EndNote and RefWorks

4)  Improvement in the display of CJK text

This Orbis upgrade represents a change to "Unicode" encoding for all 
languages, which makes some of the new features possible.  As such, it is a 
major first step in the development of a system that will fully support 
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scripts.  Nevertheless, there is much 
development work that remains and it is important to note that, at this 
time, we strongly recommend continuing to search for East Asian materials 
using Romanized search terms.  Using Romanization will continue to be the 
only reliable way to identify all relevant bibliographic records.  This is 
because:

1)  Relevant records many contain variant forms of a character (for 
example, simplified or modern rather than traditional forms of a character)

2)  Relevant records may or may not contain spaces between "words" (which 
affects retrieval)

3)  In some cases, the Microsoft IME used by many to input characters does 
not provide the form used in the bibliographic record

It is impossible to predict the form of character and spacing policy used 
in the bibliographic records, which is why searching with CJK characters is 
so problematic.  There are limited circumstances, however, in which 
searching with CJK can be recommended.  "East Asian Languages in the New 
Orbis," a full explanation of the major searching problems, some strategies 
to work around these problems, some limitations using characters with 
e-mail export and other functions, and a description of when a CJK search 
can be attempted, is now posted on the East Asia Library home page.  The 
direct link is:

   http://www.library.yale.edu/eastasian/scripts.html

We urge you to read this information (especially the two charts linked to 
this page that give examples) in order to understand the limits of working 
with characters in the new Orbis.

Despite the need to continue to rely on Romanization for searching, we are 
optimistic about continued development of the "Voyager" system that is the 
basis for Orbis.  Yale East Asia Library staff are closely consulting with 
counterparts at other universities and libraries, including Princeton, 
Columbia, the Library of Congress, and a number of others, and with our 
library administration to pressure the vendor to continue pursuing 
improvements for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean support so that reliable and 
culturally appropriate searching, sorting, and display are possible.  We 
will keep you fully informed of future changes.

In the meantime, if you should find in January that characters are not 
displaying properly in the Brief View of Orbis, please contact Tao Yang, 
EAL Public Services Librarian, (tao.yang at yale.edu) who can give you 
instructions for installing Unicode fonts.  And, do not hesitate to at 
least try out the new search capability and let us know what you think!



Ellen H. Hammond
Curator
East Asia Library
Yale University

Address:
Sterling Memorial Library
P.O. Box 208240
New Haven, CT  06520-8240

Telephone:
203-432-1791 (Direct)
203-432-1790 (East Asia Library Secretary)

Fax:
203-432-8527 
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