Multiple non‐roman scripts in aleph—israel's research library network

Abstract

As the only country in the world in which Hebrew is the official language, Israel found it necessary to develop software enabling its research library catalogs from the outset to handle two alphabets—Hebrew (including Yiddish and Ladino) and Roman characters. Starting in 1981, ALEPH, Israel's research library network, utilized locally developed software that could provide both a Hebrew and Roman mode. However, since the nation's research libraries had large collections in Arabic and Cyrillic languages, an urgent need arose for a system that could also handle Arabic and Cyrillic materials. This led to the development of soft fonts, software instead of the hardware‐based Hebrew‐English solution that was incorporated in ALEPH's earlier versions. The soft fonts can display on any VT320 or upwardly compatible terminal in Roman‐alphabet, Hebrew, Arabic, and Cyrillic. Furthermore, in the Hebrew and Arabic modes, the language of communication with the computer (commands, HELP, and so on) are also in the vernacular. This article focuses on some of the problems and solutions involved in developing ALEPH's multi‐script, bi‐directional system.

Others’ Books, Catalogues of our own: non-roman scripts in SBN

“…Valuteremo meglio questo distacco ricordando che già negli anni Ottanta del XX sec. si discuteva della catalogazione automatizzata di opere in arabo, ebraico, lingue slave, cinese e giapponese utilizzando le scritture originali (Lazinger, Levi 1996;Vernon 1996, 3-8;Ting 1985;Battaglini 1999). Un decennio dopo, grazie all'introduzione della codifica univoca dei segni appartenenti a (potenzialmente) qualunque sistema grafico con valenza semiotica, ovvero UNICODE, e la conseguente possibilità di trasmettere elettronicamente informazioni nella grafia originale senza ambiguità, ci si volse anche allo scambio dei dati tra biblioteche (Eilts 1996), per toccare infine questioni etiche, come l'eguale accesso alle informazioni da parte degli utenti che utilizzano scritture differenti (Agenbroad 2006, 29-30;Rigby 2015, 624).…”

From Acting Locally to Thinking Globally: A Brief History of Library Automation

“…Most problematic of all in many cases is supporting the character sets for local languages. Each of these countries has a slightly different character set and multiple standards exist for representing each of them (Agenbroad, 1992;ALA character set, 1989;Lazinger & Levi, 1996). Unicode, the only viable multi-lingual standard (Brickell, 1996;Peruginelli, Bergamin, & Ammendola, 1992), is not yet supported by the major library automation vendors nor the bibliographic utilities.…”