Non-Latin scripts: Issues, solutions and questions in dealing with Unicode

Abstract

The Five Colleges have significant number of bibliographic records containing CJK characters and have recently added a large collection of records representing Yiddish materials. The addition of the Yiddish records required some changes to indexing to accommodate searching with both Yiddish and Hebrew character sets. Currently we are using fix_doc_880 to create paired fields, and we have been considering what the implications of this process versus leaving the 880 fields in the bibliographic record. Additionally we have been considering how we handle paired 880 fields. We are considering reversing the order of paired fields from Latin first, non-Latin second to non-Latin first, Latin second. This session looks to review some of these issues related to handling Unicode characters, and we hope to start a discussion how other sites are handling these issues of display, indexing, searching and authority control with regard to non-Latin scripts.