Chinese Wade-Giles to Pinyin Conversion With ALEPH, GenLoad, and Connexion

Abstract

Yue Li, Formats Librarian Cataloger, Florida State University; Dongqing Xie, Coordinator of Integrated Library Systems, Florida State University.

OCLC finished Chinese vernacular Romanization from Wade-Giles to Pinyin years ago. But many libraries have never done this conversion for various reasons. Without Pinyin conversion, users cannot retrieve Chinese records and authority records if they use the current official Chinese Romanization, Pinyin. Florida State University utilized ALEPH, Connexion and GenLoad, a local data loader application, to successfully update all its 5,770 Chinese bibliographic records with the newest OCLC records. The quality of the records is greatly improved. This project has saved thousands of dollars for the Libraries. The workflow can be used to update bibliographic records in batch for any identifiable records.