The ALA-LC Romanization Tables Review Board is very pleased to report that it has officially approved the proposal for the Japanese Romanization Table revision. The proposal was initially submitted in 2018 and was resubmitted in 2021 after Romanization Tables Review Procedure was re-established. Below are the members of the Editorial Group that initiated the proposal:
- Yukari Sugiyama (Yale University)
- Chiharu Watsky (Princeton University)
- Rob Britt (University of Washington)
- Ryuta Komaki (Rikkyo University)
- Fabiano Rocha (University of Toronto)
- Chiaki Sakai (Columbia University)
- Keiko Suzuki (The New School)
- Koji Takeuchi (Library of Congress)
This approval is the direct result of a thorough review conducted by the Review Subcommittee. The Board would like to express its sincere thanks to the following Review Subcommittee members: Keiko Hill (University of Washington), Toshie Marra (UC-Berkeley), Mieko Mazza (Stanford), Tara McGowan (North American Coordinating Council of Japanese Library Resources).
The proposed revision will harmonize the Japanese Table with RDA and LC-PCC instructions; it will help greatly with the capitalization issues and with the complex division of words, which has always been a thorny dilemma for catalogers of Japanese materials. The revision will provide clear guidance with a great variety of examples of Japanese Romanization methods for catalogers and metadata specialists.
The approved table has been posted on the Library of Congress Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access ALA-LC Romanization Tables website. You can read a summary created by the CTP/CCM working group to learn more about the proposed revisions.