Kim-Chew Ah Too, Central Library Japanese Resources Dept Head

The Japanese Resources Dept is finally ready to bid goodbye to the 18 year-old Japanese card catalogue upon the completion of the Retrospective Conversion (RECON) Project in June 1999.

The RECON Project, to convert a total of 18,187 Japanese titles from traditional catalogue cards to machine-readable form, commenced in July 1997 as an important part of the computerization of the Department along with the implementation of INNOPAC, the very first library system for Japanese language resources.

With the completion of the Japanese RECON Project, the entire collection (including English, Malay, Chinese and Japanese materials) of the NUS Library is now available in a single union database LINC, our Library INtegrated Catalogue, with the ability to display Chinese, Japanese & Korean (CJK) scripts. The enriched collection is now accessible online not just to members of the NUS community, but also to remote users worldwide through the Internet.

The value of retrospective conversion of catalogue records to machine readable format is undisputed, and NUS Library has devoted considerable resources to convert its entire card catalogue records for its different collections. However, conversion of non-romanised records, especially Japanese, has been slower due to the nature of the language. The complexity of the Japanese characters, the tedious input method and the unique record structure, have made Japanese language records more difficult and more expensive to convert.

Unlike the other RECON Projects, which were outsourced to commercial vendors, the conversion of Japanese language materials was carried out as an in-house project solely by the Japanese Resources Dept staff, in addition to their normal workload.

The Japanese card catalogue is now retired with all the records included in LINC.

The old shelf-list cards of 18,187 Japanese titles were used as source records to check against the bibliographic utility OCLC (Online Computer Library Center). Accurate matches were found for 14,515 titles (80%) which were then downloaded into INNOPAC. The remaining 3,673 (20%) titles, for which no match was found, had to be transcribed in MARC format and input into INNOPAC manually. The converted bibliographic data adheres to the AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition) and MARC (Machine-Readable Catalogue) bibliographic standards. All records were completed with local information like CDATE, 595, 040 and 090 fields and Item data like Location codes, Barcode numbers. A total of 35,166 item records were created and attached to the bibliographic records in LINC.

Despite the technical difficulties unique to Japanese language computerization,our staff carried out the extra work with great team spirit and a strong commitment to complete the project. With some creative use of technology, like function keys and permanent substitution phrase to improve operational efficiencies, we were able to make great strides in bringing the RECON Project to a close in two years (July 1997 to June 1999).

After the completion of the project, presentations and online demonstrations were conducted for the teaching staff of the Dept of Japanese Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, as well as the students, with the aim of giving them a good grasp of the techniques of online searching for Japanese language materials in LINC.

To date, the Japanese collection consists of a total of 42,607 volumes with 22,317 monographic titles and 294 periodicals titles. The converted records from the RECON Project has further enhanced the usefulness of LINC as a research tools for users.