[KS] Romanization systems survey

[Joy Kim]

I just submitted an article for publication in the Journal of East Asian Libraries 149 (Oct. 2009) on Korean Studies Librarianship, 1990-2009.  The following passage comes from that article:

"The Korean Government’s rules have some features that native Koreans like and may be suitable to Romanize geographic, corporate, and personal names.  From a librarian’s perspective, however, they are far from adequate for handling the levels of complexity represented in millions of bibliographic records.  The inherent flexibility and the lack of word division guidelines would result in serious bibliographic control problems.  The lack of explicit word division guidelines assume the use of the official Korean word division rules, which introduces a whole new set of problems and issues to the overseas bibliographic and scholarly communities.  In short, for the Korean rules to be able to meet the bibliographic needs of American libraries, supplemental documents many times longer than the rules themselves would have to be developed, which would defeat the purpose of adopting the new rules."  

Below is what I wrote earlier to Brother Anthony's survey about word division

> Both the MR and RR fail to address a related, more crucial issue: 
> word division.  Both rules must assume the Korean word division 
> standard (띄어쓰기규정) to be used, but it would not work well in 
> romanized records, especially in the library environment dealing 
> with millions of bibliographic records.  That is why the Library 
> of Congress developed its own word division rules for Korean to be 
> used with the MR system.  

Joy Kim
Curator, Korean Heritage Library
http://www.usc.edu/korea 
East Asian Library
University of Southern California
University Park
Los Angeles, CA90089-1825
Tel: 213-740-2329 / Fax: 213-740-7437