The Ukrainian Kyrylytsia, Restored: An Automation Project for Adding the Cyrillic Fields to Ukrainian Records in OCLC WorldCat

Abstract

This report from the field concerns a collaborative project which resulted in successfully adding the Cyrillic fields to about 30,000 Ukrainian bibliographic records in OCLC WorldCat, the world’s largest online catalogue. Historically, the Ukrainian records in English-speaking libraries were only provided in transliteration according to the Library of Congress Romanization Table. However, the current standards also require the original script, such as the Ukrainian Kyrylytsia. While automating the Cyrillicization of Ukrainian legacy records is theoretically straightforward, in practice it faced more than one challenge, from poor quality of transliteration to the historical changes in Ukrainian orthography. The report presents the OCLC Ukrainian Cyrillicization project and discusses the steps in its implementation as an example of a successful collaboration in the areas of bibliographic automation, Ukrainian philology and culture, Slavic cataloguing, and linguistics.

Keywords:

• Ukrainian language,
• Cyrillic script,
• automatic de-transliteration,
• Library of Congress transliteration,
• cataloguing,
• OCLC WorldCat