The law library’s print collection includes many non-English books and journals, including materials published in languages that do not use the Roman/Latin alphabet.
The example below shows the HOLLIS+ record of a Russian-language book that was recently added to the collection. Information in several of the fields, including the title, is shown first in Cyrillic, and then in what is known as “transliterated” or “Romanized” Russian:
The law library’s catalogers use the ALA-LC Romanization rules to create the transliterated text. Romanization tables showing these rules, for languages from Amharic to Vai, are available to the public through the Library of Congress’s website: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html.
Want to learn more about how Romanization works for non Latin/Roman alphabet-language materials in libraries? Check out these resources:
- Yale University Library: Searching in non-Roman Script
- Princeton University Library Near East Collections: Romanization Tables and Calendar Converters
- University of Michigan Near Eastern Studies Library Resources: Arabic, Hebrew, Ottoman, Persian Transliteration
- University of Virginia: Finding Tibetan Texts
- University of Texas Library: Korean Romanization Stystem and Word Division
- University of Arizona Slavic Information Literacy Site: Transliteration and Transcription
- Stanford University Libraries: Russia, East Central Europe and Eurasia: Transliteration and Computer Setup
- Cornell University Library Foreign Language Resources: Abbreviations, Months, and Numbers in Foreign Languages