Bodleian Library's CJK Allegro Catalogues
The Library's original script allegro catalogues of Chinese and Japanese materials were made accessible through the WWW in December, 1997. Under Windows 2000/XP/NT we recommend the use of the latest verision of Internet Explorer in conjunction with Microsoft's East Asian fonts and "Global IME"; with earlier versions of Windows (95/98) better results are obtained with an old version of Netscape (4.7) and a front-end processor such as NJStar or UnionWay. Help screens and further information about the implementations are in preparation, and will appear on the catalogue pages in the near future. The Chinese and Japanese catalogues currently contain some 140,000 and 62,000 records respectively.
Chinese Catalogue
(full-form characters)
Japanese
Catalogue
WWW access to allegro databases was developed at Braunschweig Technical University by Dierk Hoeppner. In Oxford, it has been implemented by Thaddeus Lipinski, whose work was initially financed by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). This, together with generous help from all members of the allegro team in Braunschweig, is gratefully acknowledged.
UK CHINESE AND JAPANESE UNION CATALOGUES
The successful outcome of this work, and growing expertise in the use of allegro, has made other developments possible. Most notable is the provision of access to the European union catalogue of Japanese books. This is hosted by NII (National Institute of Informatics, formerly NACSIS) in Tokyo, which in 1991 offered its services free of charge to a consortium of UK libraries with the aim of facilitating the cataloguing of Japanese material and thus contributing towards the formation of a worldwide catalogue of Japanese books. Continental European libraries later joined the project, and their holdings were included in the union catalogue from 2005. The database offers readers improved access to the holdings of Japanese research collections throughout Europe, and currently contains over 187,000 bibliographic records to which 267,000 copy records are linked. Only a few of the libraries have completed the retrospective conversion of catalogue records for older items. Updates to the Union Catalogue are received weekly from NII and immediately incorporated into the database.
The ability of allegro to import (convert) data from a wide variety of sources offers the technical possibility of incorporating data currently held in quite different and varied formats into a single, homogeneous database. This has recently led to the construction of a UK Union Catalogue of Chinese Books under the auspices of RSLP (Research Support Libraries Project). The database incorporates Chinese records in original script from the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Brotherton Library (Leeds), and the university libraries of Cambridge, Durham, SOAS (London) and Edinburgh, and is updated regularly. It currently contains over 297,500 records, representing some 242,000 different titles.