Community Languages records in Symphony & Enterprise

PLS has begun a process of loading the catalogue records for our recently arrived Community Languages material into Symphony.  The real benefit of this is that Symphony can handle a number of "non-Roman" scripts and can also include the diacritics that are vital in some languages to make sense of the words.  (P2 does not handle either non-Roman scripts or diacritics, so the records that we have been getting from the suppliers and have been providing to libraries have lacked these symbols, leading to less than desirable records.)

At this stage the process is quite manual with PLS staff having to make a number of changes to each record as they get loaded.  We will be looking to automate this process in the future, however we're not sure how long that will take to achieve.

Below are two records for items that are now in Symphony. You will note that the 1st record is for a Vietnamese book.  Vietnamese uses a modified "Roman" alphabet, adding diacritics to get the correct meaning.  The second record is for a Chinese book & it is using Chinese characters correctly for the title of the book.

We are delighted that we can now add this feature to the catalogue, as it will enable many of our customers to independently and accurately search for and find items in their native language.