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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

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