General information

Standard character sets and transliterations

Cindy Hepfer, ALA’s Voting Representative to NISO, has been busy pushing NISO standards announcements our way. I will be combining the announcements to save your time and LITABlog space. Instructions for requesting the relevant documents from Cindy appears at the end of this message.

The first group of announcements has to do with special character sets and transliteration.

1. Systematic Review ISO 10754:1996, Extension of the Cyrillic alphabet coded character set for non-Slavic languages for bibliographic information interchange.

“This is version three of the standard that specifies a set of 93 graphic characters with their coded representations. It consists of a code table and a legend showing each graphic, its use and its name. Explanatory notes are also included. The character set is primarily intended for the interchange of information among data processing systems and within message transmission systems.”

The deadline for comments to Cindy is no later than Monday, Feb. 22, 2010.

2. Systematic Review ISO 233-3:1999, Transliteration of Persian characters into Latin characters.

“This part of ISO 233 establishes a simplified system for the transliteration of Persian characters into Latin characters. This simplification of the stringent rules established by ISO 233:1984 is especially intended to facilitate the processing of bibliographic information (e.g. catalogues, indices, citations, etc.”

The deadline for comments to Cindy is no later than Friday, Feb. 19, 2010.

3. Systematic Review IS0 9984:1996, Transliteration of Georgian characters into Latin characters.

“This International Standard establishes a system for the transliteration of Georgian characters into Latin characters in accordance with the principles of stringent conversion in order to permit international information exchange, particularly by electronic means.”

The deadline for comments to Cindy is no later than Thursday, Feb. 18, 2010.

ISO standards documents are not openly available, but ALA members can request documents for the purpose of review and comment from Cindy at HSLcindy@buffalo.edu (please also copy me at metadata.maven@gmail.com). Please be sure to state explicitly that you ARE a current ALA member — Cindy will not send you a document without this assurance.

In the absence of other recommendations, ALA will recommend that NISO vote to confirm these standards. If you believe ALA should recommend another option, you must provide comments for Cindy to pass along with ALA’s recommendation.

More announcements to come …

Diane I. Hillmann
LITA Standards Coordinator