The Wade-Giles system has been widely used throughout the world to romanize Chinese for a little over one hundred years. In the early 1950's, the People's Republic of China devised the pinyin romanization system as its official standard. Most libraries in the English speaking world continued to use Wade-Giles. However, as the People's Republic of China achieved greater political and economic influence in the world, the pinyin system gradually gained widespread acceptance. It is now the internationally recognized standard for romanizing Chinese and has essentially replaced Wade-Giles.
North American libraries were reluctant to adopt pinyin for processing Chinese language materials simply because of the enormous amount of work involved in converting millions of biblographic records from Wade-Giles. No institution had the resources to do a manual conversion of Chinese catalog records. The only workable alternative to a complete conversion was to have split files in the catalog, with older materials remaining in Wade-Giles and new materials being in pinyin. The majority of libraries regarded this as unacceptable and proposals to change to pinyin were rejected.
In the mid 1990's it became clear that the Wade-Giles system was being used less and less in academia, governmental circles, and the world at large. The Library of Congress revisited the idea of adopting the pinyin system and began to investigate computerized conversion of online library records from Wade-Giles to pinyin. After several years of research, consultation, and planning, the Library of Congress decided to switch to pinyin.
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the United States. It provides more catalog records than any other single insitution. Although not a national library by definition, it functions as one and sets the rules and standards that the vast majority of academic, public, and private libraries in this country agree to follow. Consequently, what LC does affects library operations across the nation; pinyin conversion is a prime example of such a decison by LC.
Shared cataloging is a concept which allows libraries to share electronic catalog records through two large bibliographic networks. Since everyone uses these records it is very important that all participants follow the same rules so that consistency is maintained in the catalog. One network is called OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) and is known to faculty and students at the UW as WorldCat (available on the Information Gateway). The other network is RLIN (Research Libraries Information Network). Records created by the Library of Congress are distributed through both networks. Individual libraries that are members of either network contribute their own original catalog records and are able to make use of those created by LC and other member libraries. It means that, in theory, only one library need create a catalog record for any given title and that all other libraries can use it immediately, thereby avoiding the work of creating an original record from scratch.
In any pinyin project, the majority of electronic catalog records would have to be converted at the network level in order to achieve an economy of scale and enable local libraries to make the change with a minimum of manual time consuming manual labor.
The official change to pinyin took place on October 1, 2000. From this date on libraries agreed to create new catalog records only in pinyin. Records created prior to this date were still in Wade-Giles.
The software program that converts Chinese language records from Wade-Giles to pinyin was written for the Library of Congress by the RLIN network. It is the same software, with minor revsions, used by OCLC to convert records in their network.
The mass conversion of records began in early 2001 when RLIN started processing records for Chinese books held by the Library of Congress. This was followed by the conversion of records of member libraries in RLIN. Shortly thereafter, OCLC converted records for Chinese serials held by the Library of Congress and followed with conversion of books and materials in other formats. All LC records are available in both networks.
At the national level, conversion has taken place in phases with select groups of records being processed over a set period of time. On a local basis, smaller collections were often able to complete their conversion within a short period of time. However, large libraries with complex collection arrangements and a significant number of paper-based records have been forced to divide their conversion projects into groups which are implemented in phases. In this case, library users must navigate an on-going catalog conversion project with large numbers of catalog records still in Wade-Giles.
Converting records to pinyin is far more than a simple one-to-one change; it is a very detailed matter. For example, there are some Chinese personal names which should remain in Wade-Giles form; "Tu, Wei-ming" is one example. English words in mixed text should not be converted, but how does the machine know what do do? The English preposition "to" should not be changed to "duo." There are various other exceptions and situations which require informed human decisions.
The software that converts records from Wade-Giles to pinyin is complex and by no means perfect. The conversion process, while accurate for the vast majority of records, does result in a fair number of errors, anomalies, and unexpected irregularities. In fact, there are many records which need to be manually checked and corrected. This is a labor intensive, on-going process and will take several years or more to complete. In the meantime, we will keep you informed of known problems and of our progress on converting Chinese records to pinyin.