ALA-LC (

American Library Association The American Library Association (ALA) is a nonprofit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world. History 19th century ...

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...

) is a set of standards for

romanization In linguistics, romanization is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Latin script, Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and tra ...

, the representation of text in other

writing system A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independen ...

s using the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

Applications

The system is used to represent bibliographic information by North American libraries and the British Library (for acquisitions since 1975)Searching for Cyrillic items in the catalogues of the British Library: guidelines and transliteration tables
and in publications throughout the English-speaking world. The

Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules ''Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules'' (AACR) were an international library cataloging standard. First published in 1967 and edited by C. Sumner Spalding, a second edition (AACR2) edited by Michael Gorman and Paul W. Winkler was issued in 1978, ...

require catalogers to romanize access points from their non-Roman originals. However, as the

MARC standards MARC (machine-readable cataloging) is a standard set of digital formats for the machine-readable description of items catalogued by libraries, such as books, DVDs, and digital resources. Computerized library catalogs and library management ...

have been expanded to allow records containing

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

characters, many cataloguers now include bibliographic data in both Roman and original scripts. The emerging

Resource Description and Access Resource Description and Access (RDA) is a standard for descriptive cataloging initially released in June 2010, providing instructions and guidelines on formulating bibliographic data. Intended for use by libraries and other cultural organization ...

continues many of AACR's recommendations but refers to the process as "

transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus '' trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → and → the digraph , Cyrillic → , Armenian → or L ...

" rather than "Romanization."

Scripts

The ALA-LC Romanization includes over 70 romanization tables. Here are some examples of tables: * A

Cherokee The Cherokee (; , or ) people are one of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States. Prior to the 18th century, they were concentrated in their homelands, in towns along river valleys of what is now southwestern ...

Romanization table was created by the LC and ALA in 2012 and subsequently approved by the Cherokee Tri-Council meeting in

Cherokee, North Carolina Cherokee () is a census-designated place (CDP) in Swain and Jackson counties in Western North Carolina, United States, within the Qualla Boundary land trust. Cherokee is located in the Oconaluftee River Valley around the intersection of U.S. ...

. It was the first ALA-LC Romanization table for a Native American syllabary. * The Chinese Romanization table used the

Wade–Giles Wade–Giles ( ) is a romanization system for Mandarin Chinese. It developed from the system produced by Thomas Francis Wade during the mid-19th century, and was given completed form with Herbert Giles's '' A Chinese–English Dictionary'' ...

transliteration system until 1997, when the Library of Congress (LC) announced a decision to switch to the

Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. ''Hanyu'' () literally means 'Han Chinese, Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while ''pinyin' ...

system.

References

External links

ALA-LC Romanization Tables
{{Romanization Library cataloging and classification

Applications

Scripts

See also

References

External links