ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


April 1988 /  211

International Conference on 
Scholarly Inform ation Network

By Sachié Noguchi

Assistant Japanese Librarian 
University o f Illinois at Urbana-Cham paign

East Asian applications and international cooperation, 
Tokyo, D ecem ber 8 -11, 1987.

I n  East Asia, under the influence of the West, na­
tional and university library automation has pro­
gressed, and the number of machine-readable bib­
lio g rap h ic records has grown rapid ly. For 
instance, in Japan, in addition to JAPAN MARC 
distributed by the National Diet Library, biblio­
graphic information on academic and research 
materials is created and distributed by the National 
Center for Science Information System (NACSIS) 
under the banner of the Scholarly Information Sys­
tem.

Chinese characters are used in Chinese, Japa­
nese, and Korean languages; however, they are 
read differently and have developed variant forms 
within each language community. In addition to 
the adopted Chinese system of writing, the Japa­
nese use a syllabic script called kana and the Kore­
ans employ hangul. Each language community de­
veloped each two-byte (except C C C II in Taiwan) 
character set code independently and there has 
been little discussion concerning exchange of infor­
mation about the Chinese character set code or 
about bibliographic data among East Asian coun­
tries.

On the other hand, in North America, the Re­
search Library Group (RLG) developed and inau­
gurated the bibliographic network system which is 
capable of processing Chinese, Japanese, and Ko­

rean (CJK) scripts as an RLIN subsystem. This was 
done in cooperation with the Library of Congress 
in 1983. More than 300,000 bibliographic records 
have already been accumulated. The Online Com­
puter Library Center (OCLC) launched its CJK 
subsystem in May 1986. These two CJK systems are 
used by thirty-four libraries in North America and 
by the British Library. Both RLIN and O CLC CJK 
subsystem use a three-byte character code, the 
RLIN East Asian Character Code (REACC), and it 
is expected that the REACC will be established as 
the “American National Standard, East Asian 
Character Code set for Bibliographic Use.” Its the­
saurus is under the administration of the Library of 
Congress.

Utlas International Canada introduced the sys­
tem into Japan in 1985 and it is used mainly among 
private university libraries. In 1987, Utlas devel­
oped Japan CATSS as a bibliographic utility specif­
ically for Japanese language materials. It uses mod­
ified JAPAN MARC format and the same character 
set as the National Diet Library of Japan (Japan In­
dustrial Standard C6226 1978, two-byte).

It was obviously time to coordinate the stan­
dardization and stabilization of character set and 
bibliographic data among East Asian countries to 
facilitate the future exchange of data among them­
selves and across the Pacific. NACSIS of Japan took



212 /  C &RL News

the initiative to organize the first International 
Conference on Scholarly Information Network— 
E a s t Asian A p p licatio n s & In te rn a tio n a l 
Cooperation— on December 8 -1 1 , 1987, by invit­
ing interested parties to Tokyo to discuss the prob­
lems involved and attempt to reach a consensus on 
these issues.

The conference took place at NACSIS and at the 
National Diet Library. Seventeen invited panelists 
attended from Jap an , and sixteen from Hong 
Kong, Korea, the People’s Republic of China, T ai­
wan, the Federal Republic of Germany, the United 
Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. There 
were also fifteen observers from Japan and the 
United States. Among the North American mem­
bers of the panel were C. James Schmidt (RLIN), 
Rowland C .W . Brown and Andrew H. W ang 
(O C LC ), Robert F. Asleson and N. Furuya (Utlas 
International Canada), Beacher Wiggins (Library 
of Congress), and C .J. Durance (National Library 
of Canada).

The discussion at the conference was based on 
the six position papers and the eighteen that com­
mented on them. These were distributed to the 
participants before the conference. Round Table 1 
was entitled “Improvement of International Ex­
change of Scholarly Inform ation.” Round Table 2 
dealt with the technical issues of East Asian charac­
ter set codes. An open forum for the public catered 
for the growing interests in bibliographic utilities 
among the Japanese library community. Utlas and 
O C LC  have made inroads into the Japanese mar­

ket, and they and the British Library, RLIN , and 
N A C SIS m ade in tro d u cto ry  p resen tatio n s to 
mainly Japanese audiences.

There are two technical committees (TC 97 and 
T C  46) working on character sets within Interna­
tional Standardization Organization (ISO), and it 
was felt that they should either be amalgamated or 
responsibility be given only to one. The Interna­
tional Organizing Committee agreed to submit a 
“review paper” to ISO on this matter. The neces­
sity for a coordinating body of national standards 
of character set was expressed by a quite few mem­
bers represented by the proposals from L C , Inter­
national Committee on Character Bet Coordina­
tion, and NACSIS, Clearing Center for Chinese 
Character Users in East Asian environment. The 
Committee unanimously agreed to continue the di­
alogue and cooperative efforts for the international 
exchange of scholarly information in the future.

Today, technology has blurred national bound­
aries, and cultural and language demarcation are 
no longer quite so clearly defined. By bringing to­
gether the major bibliographic utilities and other 
bodies involved in the area, this conference offered 
a precious opportunity for promoting mutual un­
derstanding and sharing the common issues. It was 
a crucial, constructive step towards coordinating 
the basis for bibliographic data communication 
containing East Asian scripts, and for international 
scholarly information exchange of such data be­
tween East Asia, North America, and Europe.

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