Dissertation Information for James D. Anderson NAME: - James D. Anderson
- (Alias) James Anderson
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- Library and Information Science
SCHOOL:
- Columbia University (USA) (1972)
ADVISORS: - Maurice Tauber
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - None
MPACT Status: Incomplete - Inspected
Title: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF METHODS OF ARRANGING CHINESE LANGUAGE AUTHOR-TITLECATALOGS IN LARGE AMERICAN CHINESE LANGUAGE COLLECTIONS
Abstract: Four fundamentally different methods used to arrange the author-title catalogs of the thirteen Chinese language collections in the United States and Canada having more than 100,000 volumes ; were compared on the basis of the amount of information required to locate entries in catalogs arranged by these four methods. The four methods considered and the library catalogs which were investigated 'as examples of these methods were: (1) alphabetical arrangement of entries on the basis of their Romanization, as represented by the Romanized catalog of Princeton University's Gest Oriental Library; (2) character by character arrangement, first by the alphabetic position of a character's Romanization, second by the number of strokes comprising the character, and third by the radical of the character, as represented by the Romanized-stroke catalog of Columbia University's East Asian Library; (3) numerical arrangement according to the Wang four-corner numeral system of assigning numbers to characters on the basis of the types of strokes in their corners, as represented by the Wang four-corner catalog of Princeton University's Gest Oriental Library; and (4) character by character arrangement, first by the radical of a character, second by the number of strokes in the non-radical portion of the character, and third by the radical of the non-radical portion of the character, as represented by the radical-stroke catalog of the East Asiatic Library of the University of California at Berkeley. It was found that in spite of the enormous differences in the number of potential filing positions provided by these arrangement methods, ranging from less than 300 per character to nearly 3,000,000, the amount of information required by these arrangement methods to locate entries did not differ by more than approximately 15 percent. 10 addition to the comparison of arrangement methods, catalog users were surveyed to determine the extent to which they obtained bibliographic information about Chinese language materials only in Romanized form as opposed to Chinese character form. It was found that users of Chinese language catalogs obtain bibliographic information only in Romanized form about 25 percent of the time. Since the conversion of Romanized bibliographic information to the correct Chinese characters represented is often difficult, users with only Romanized bibliographic information find catalogs arranged on the basis of Chinese characters difficult, if not impossible, to consult. The results of this study reinforce the current trend toward the strictly alphabetical arrangement of Chinese language library catalogs on the basis of Romanized entries. The seeming advantage of character-based arrangement methods, that they supply many more file positions for characters and consequently permit more direct access to entries, was found to be quite small in actual practice, too small to compensate for the difficulty which users having only Romanized bibliographic information experience when they consult character-based catalogs.
| |
MPACT Scores for James D. Anderson A = 7
C = 6
A+C = 13
T = 11
G = 2
W = 7
TD = 9
TA = 1
calculated 2008-02-01 21:13:38
Advisors and Advisees Graph
|