Subject: CJK Workbook Update
New Years Greetings to Workbook Compilers!
I have not written in several months; but now, at year's
end, I feel that I should bring you up to date on the
project to revise the AACR2 workbook for East Asian
material.
In December, I received the final draft workbook chapter
from its compiler; I have now received drafts of all of
the chapters. We at LC have been able to work with the
roman text of most of the draft chapters that we have been
sent on disk. LC staff members Young Lee and Sonya Lee have been inputting CJK
text, using Twinbridge Partner 3.0 for NT. We have completed input of CJK text for 7 chapters (out of 15).
Most characters have been added to 5 others; and one chapter
does not include any CJK characters. The remaining two
chapters are lengthy, and must be keyed in from scratch.
Although Twinbridge advertises a conversion function, we
have had no success in getting it to help with workbook
chapters that consist of roman text intersperced with
Korean, Japanese and traditional and/or brief Chinese forms.
Therefore, in order to come away with an attractive text
with compatible fonts, we are obliged to key in the
characters one at a time. Also, it is necessary to retype
some or all of the diacritic marks in each of the chapters
because they did not convert, or add them because they were
not provided in the draft. As CJK text is added to each
chapter, I download it onto a disk, take it home, and then
change the Wade-Giles to pinyin throughout.
As I indicated before, this whole process is very
time-consuming, and now involves several people besides
myself. We have fallen far behind our earlier schedules,
and now I hesitate to predict when we will finish. We do
hope to have completed a first draft by the beginning of
February. Then, each of the chapters will be reviewed by LC
catalogers and a final draft will be prepared. We will work
at it in whatever time we have available, and keep pushing
ahead as best we can.
In January or early February, I hope to send you examples
of several of the formats that you have used in compiling
your chapters. I will ask for your opinions, along with
that of the catalogers at LC who are working on the project,
to come up with an attractive and utilitarian format for
the workbook before a final revision is begun.
I have been in contact with LC's Cataloging Distribution
Service. CDS continues to seek copyright approval from ALA
and the British Library Association for our publication.
They have reiterated their intention to help us publish the
workbook, and to add the examples from it to Catalogers
Desktop.
I hope to see you, if not at ALA Midwinter, then at the CEAL
conference in March. Have a happy and safe new year.
Philip
cc: Bill McCloy
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Philip Melzer, Team Leader
Korean-Chinese Cataloging Team
Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division
Library of Congress
(202) 707-7961
pmel@loc.gov
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