Papers for

library software developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Library catalogues differ in how they list and find translated books

Translations in library catalogues: how to find them?

Abstract: In library catalogues based on MARC21 bibliographic metadata schema there are about a dozen data elements that catalogers can utilize to record information about the different aspects of translations: whether or not the edition is a translation, source and target language, title of the original work, translator and other contributors, publication data of the original work, literary genre. Libraries however rarely explore the full arsenal, thus to find translation is not a trivial task. The paper describes these important MARC21 data elements, and shows a use case of finding translations in five catalogues (of the Norwegian, Croatian, Polish, Belgian and Dutch national libraries) explaining the differences among the practices, and the results.

Fri 23 OctDigital Libraries
The gist
Finding books that are translations can be tricky because library catalogues don’t use all the available fields to describe translations. The paper explains how cataloguers can use different data elements to record details like the original language, translator, and original title. It compares how five national libraries handle these data and how that affects finding translated works. This shows that searching for translations in library catalogues is not straightforward and varies by country.
Open → 2610.32176v1