August 15, 2008
BS"D
Greetings all:
It occurs to me now that I might have checked for existing work on
the lists before I did this, but anyway -- we are in the finishing
stages of creating scripts that will automatically convert a
library's existing Romanized MARC Hebrew fields (e.g. "Sefer
{dotb}Hatan Torah") into Hebrew-script, and add them to the records
already in the ILS. It's quite accurate; not bulletproof, but at
least it's a way to quickly get Hebrew script into thousands of
Roman-only records, where many Hebrew users (including staff) may not
understand the transliteration rules 100%.
The Hebrew conversion itself is done by a PHP script (haven't
finished learning Perl) acting on a MARC dump of Roman-only Hebrew
records in MRK (broken MARCedit) format. This outputs two files of
converted fields: an XML file for proofing, and a tab-delimited text
file for the inputting script to devour. This inputting is done by
an Expect script using the character-based ILS client.
We are an III shop. This could presumably be adapted easily enough
for another ILS, whether using Expect or direct manipulation of
database tables. (I'm not volunteering, though...) It would probably
be easy enough to adapt to another language also, assuming that
language were at least as predictable in MARC as Hebrew. (It's
pretty good - my list of "manual override" words that the
auto-algorithm botches is now totaling about 35 in preliminary testing.)
Note that I can't imagine automating the other direction, Hebrew- to
Roman-script, unless there's some algorithm for this already floating
around out there.
If anyone's interested, I'll clean up the code and open-source it.
Cheers, Shabbat shalom,
--
Yitzchak Schaffer
Systems Librarian
Touro College Libraries
33 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10010
Tel (212) 463-0400 x5230
Fax (212) 627-3197
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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