Partnership Results in Ground-breaking Support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean Character Sets

PROVO, UT, October 31, 2008 – Stanford University and SirsiDynix, the global leader in strategic technology solutions for libraries, today officially announced the completion of a project that allows searching and display of the library’s Chinese, Japanese, and Korean holdings in the original scripts. In a previous related project, functionality for searching, sorting, and displaying was made available for Arabic and Hebrew scripts.

Stanford and SirsiDynix worked together for over a year to make support for Asian and other non-Roman character sets a reality in the Stanford environment. In order to make the character sets available and of the highest quality, Stanford and SirsiDynix partnered on the intricate details of searching, sorting, and displaying of multiple character sets in a single collection for both patron and staff access. Stanford Libraries’ language experts assisted and offered enhancement suggestions to culminate in the most accurate, high-quality search solution available. Stanford moved from their original SirsiDynix Unicorn library system to a newer system—SirsiDynix Symphony®—and a Unicode platform to make the character set display possible.

Catherine Tierney, Associate University Librarian for Technical Services at Stanford, said, “This project was a successful partnership between Stanford and SirsiDynix. Stanford Libraries provided language expertise and input to the required functionality, and SirsiDynix development was very responsive. When Stanford discovered issues during testing and implementation, SirsiDynix worked hard and ensured critical needs were addressed before production implementation.”

Finding information in other language scripts is crucial to many Stanford scholars. In fact, states Assunta Pisani, Associate University Librarian for Collections and Services at Stanford, "Offering native character support for our Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew and Arabic scholars has been a critical priority for Stanford University Libraries, and we are delighted finally to be able to do so. The ability to search, sort, and display records of our significant holdings in these scripts represents a vast improvement in the potential for discovery and access to these materials through our catalog.”

Gary Rautenstrauch, CEO at SirsiDynix, said, “The SirsiDynix and Stanford partnership was a success for both parties—and for patrons who will be assisted with this new functionality. This partnership has expanded the capabilities of our Unicode offering to further the extensive multilingual access that supports the research and educational needs of all people.”

Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources supports Stanford’s mission of teaching, learning, and research by making information and knowledge accessible and preserving it for the future. The libraries have amassed rich collections of more than 8.5 million volumes in the humanities, social sciences, science and engineering.

To see the new Chinese, Japanese and Korean character set functionality, go to http://socrates.stanford.edu/.

For further information about support for Latin-based and non-Latin character sets, contact SirsiDynix at
1-800-288-2080, extension 1 or email sales@sirsidynix.com.