Brief Report on the Sinica Collection of the Austrian National Library

by Basilia Fang

The collection consists mostly of historical holdings among which the famous Rosthorn collection.
A complete card catalogue with Chinese characters, Wade- Giles and Pinyin transcriptions exists. It has also been published in 1992.

Automation: A retrospective conversion of the sinological holdings is under way since January 1994. I am following RAK on Allegro C ( 12.2.1992) under ET. The configuration P. CFGMAB1 for Allegro is being used.
This step into automation has been made possible thanks to Dr. Thomas Hahn, who provided the software and confguration examples through the University of Heidelberg and thanks to the cooperation with the computing technicians in Vienna.
Nine indeces are provided.
Authors and editors are entered under Wade- Giles and Chinese characters.
Titles are entered with Wade- Giles, Pinyin and Chinese characters.
All titles of a series (ts'ung- shu) are being saved seperately and can therefore be traced as individual titles. Thus a single title of a series can be ordered without having to take out the whole series, for example: Sin. 1095, (vol. 5): (H.): 32. Obviously all volumes have to be numbered and bound, which is not yet always the case. Over 100 ts'ung- shu have been catalogued in this way.
The catalogue does not contain any subject- headings.
The retrospective conversion of the sinologica, holdings is expected to be concluded by the end of 1997. It will then be accessible to our library users on a PC in the catalogue room or it will be accessible through the network catalogue BIBOS (library organization system). Beginning with the end of this year or early next year the sinological catalogue will be on the internet as well.

Current problems of cataloguing the sinological holdings in the title catalogue and the library network
Chinese titles beginning from 1930 are included in the title catalogue of the Austrian National Library (ÖNB) with Wade- Giles transcripiton, but without Chinese characters. In the case of translations from a Chinese original authors name, editors or titles are all in Wade- Giles.
Since the change from PI to RAK cataloguing has taken place in the 80s and since the beginning of online- cataloguing (BIBOS network catalogue) it has been decided to use only Pinyin as transcription. Unfortunately this decision was not respected by many libraries within the network (university libraries). The consequence is that one library enters the main- title or the first author under Pinyin, while others enter it with Wade- Giles. Futhermore the title catalogue used for the retrospective conversion of the sinological holdings of the Austrian National Library contains only Wade- Giles.
Although it has been decided that cataloguing under RAK should only contain Pinyin transcription it is forseeable that under the current situation with the contemporary use of Pinyin and Wade- Giles there will be considerable problems for the online catalogue.
Although the internationally only Pinyin and Wade- Giles have become standard and Europe has mostly opted for Pinyin, which the Ö- norm Institute also accepts as standard, older national transcriptions persist, for example in the Duden, where you will find entries such as "Tschiang Kai- schek".
In the following I give some examples out of BIBOS that result from this confusing practice. You may notice that the entries with Wade- Giles still dominate.

Pa, Chin	ÖNB (local) network imported	1 title 4 titles (retro) 6 titles (Frankfurt 292)
Ba Jin	ÖNB network imported	1 title (PY), 1 title (WG) 4 titles (retro) 6 titles (Frankfurt 292)
Lu, Hsün	ÖNB network imported	1 title 4 titles 20 titles
Lu, Xun	ÖNB network imported	1 title 8 titles 17 titles
P'u, Sung-ling	ÖNB network imported	7 titles 0 titles 13 titles
Pu, Song-ling	NO RESULT	NO RESULT
Hung-lou-meng	ÖNB network imported	0 titles 1 title 8 titles (Frankfurt 292)
Hong-lou-meng	network imported	1 title 3 titles (Frankfurt 292)

Note what different kind of transcriptions can be found for title of the Chinese anthology:
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Kin Ku Ki Kwan (Ubers.) Franz Kuhn, Manesse Verlag 1952
Djin-gutji-gwan (Ubers.) Gottfried Rösel, Manesse 1984
Chin-ku-ch'i-kwan (title given in the impressum for Rösel 1984)
Chin-ku-ch'i-kuan
Jin-gu-qi-guan

I suggest that since the network has decided to use Pinyin every librarian should use it, no matter what entry is given on the booktitle. It cannot be our goal to have results on an online catalogue as seen in the above examples!