EASTASIA - International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science

Egovlinks (www.egovlinks.com).

Margolis, M. and Resnick, D. (2000)Politics as Usual:

The Cyberspace ‘Revolution’, Sage [for a very sceptical view].

SEE ALSO: information society

ANDREW CHADWICK

is developed by native speakers or non-native speakers. In an attempt to produce generally acceptable schemes, modern governments in East Asia introduced new revised schemes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Kunrei method for Japanese was introduced in 1937 and 1954, the Pin Yin method for Chinese in 1958 and the latest scheme for Korean in 2000. In the case of Korean, there have been several revisions of the scheme and a mixed version is now commonly used.

COMPUTER CHARACTER SET STANDARDS

Computer diffusion in East Asia has been phe- nomenal, especially since 1995. Computer development work was started in the 1950s in each country. Until around the mid-1970s, national language support was unavailable because of the scripts and the large number of characters in the East Asian languages. Encoded character sets had to be developed to facilitate natural language processing; these were used with Western pro- ducts in the early stages of development.

Although the conventions by which the characters are used in the three languages differ from each other, their fundamental characteristics are the same. In particular the Chinese character set is open-ended, i.e. new characters can emerge by government policy, by voluntary addition or by mistake. Thus it is impossible in theory to get a complete set of Chinese characters in each language.

In the last thirty years of the twentieth century, effort was devoted to establishing standard character codes and sets in three languages. During the 1970s, all three countries established national standards for a computer character set in one byte based on ASCII, and followed this with the development of national standards of domestic Chinese characters in two bytes. They are Japa- nese JIS C6226 in 1978, Chinese GB 2312 in 1980, Chinese (Taipei) CNS 11643 in 1986 and Korean KS C 5601 in 1987. CCCII code created in Taiwan in 1980 became the East Asian Common Character (EACC) for the US Research Libraries Group (RLG) and others, and then became ANSI Z39.64: 1989.

In the computer industry, de facto standards are common practice. Big 5 was developed in Taiwan in 1984 for Chinese characters, and the Shift JIS code was developed for Japanese perso- nal computers during the 1970s. Both standards are in widespread use.

The publication of the Unicode 1^st edition in 1980 and UCS (Universal Character Set: ISO 10646) in 1993 had an impact on the computer industry, its customers and governments in East Asia, and indeed on worldwide users of Chinese characters and the East Asian languages. The three governments made tremendous efforts to harmonize the development of the Unicode, ISO/

UCS and national standards for computer character sets. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it seems that the technical harmonization has been achieved. The next step is the change over to the Unicode/UCS environment among users. It is estimated that a company-wide changeover of the character code in a big company would need investment in a scale of several million (US) dollars.

NATIONAL MARCS AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC UTILITIES

Developing the capacity of natural language processing in Chinese characters made it possible to create and maintain national bibliographic databases (marc) in the national languages of East Asia. The standards are the China MARC, the Japan MARCand the KOR MARC. House- keeping, technical processing and circulation systemcontrol all started during the 1970s.

The National Diet Library (NDL), Tokyo, was founded in 1948 and is the national parliamentary library controlled by the legisla- ture (www.ndl.go.jp/e/index.html). It started computerization of its operations in1970. Prior to the publication of Japan MARCin 1981, a cataloguing system for Japanese materials (1977) and a printed weekly list of publications (1978) were implemented by NDL. The Japan MARCis unimarc compatible and covers 2.7 million catalogue records since 1864. The Web OPAC(see opacs) of NDL holdings is a very popular website. The second NDL, the new Kansai-Kan, is due to be opened in 2002 in Nara near Osaka.

The National Library of China (known as The Beijing Library) was established in 1909; it now holds some 23 million items (www.nlc.gov.cn/

english.htm). It started computer utilization in the middle of the 1980s and established the China MARC in 1990. China MARC format is IFLA UNIMARCcompatible, and was established as a cultural professional standard (WH/T 0503–96) in 1996. The China MARC database covers 1.1 million bibliographic records of Chi- nese books published since 1979.

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The National Library of Korea (NLK), Seoul, was established in 1945 and holds 4.1 million items (www.nl.go.kr/eng/index.php3). It started computerization of bibliographic services in 1976, backed by a government plan for computer applications for administration. KOR MARC printed-card distribution was started in 1983.

The KOR MARCformat is a national standard (KS X 6006–2), is usmarc compatible, covers 1.8 million bibliographic records and is operated on the KOLIS system (KOrean LIbrary System), based on the Windows system. NLK has run the Korean Library Information Network (KOLIS- NET) since 1991. The digital library Pro- gramme was started in 1998 and holds 59 million pages of scanned images.

Bibliographic utilities were developed in the region during the 1980s and 1990s. They are NII/NACSIS (Japan) (www.nii.ac.jp/index.html), KERIS (Korea) (www.keris.or.kr/eng/eng.html) and CALIS (China) (www.calis.edu.cn). A common feature is that these three organizations were all established primarily for academia and maintained by government funds as not-for-profit organizations. In 1984, a shared cataloguing system was installed in Japan, which became NACSIS-CAT. It was designed as a relational databasesystem based on the entity-relationship model. As of 2001, 1,200 libraries in 900 universities among 1,200 higher-education institutions in Japan were participating in NACSIS- CAT, which now contains 6.1 million bibliographic records and 58.6 million records of holdings. NACSIS was transferred to the Na- tional Institute of Informatics (NII) in 2000.

NACSIS/NII offers an online shared cataloguing system, and an interlibrary loan requests system, electronic journals, scanned journal articles andopacs.

In 1994, the Korea Research Information Centre was established by the Ministry of Educa- tion and transformed into the Korea Education and Research Information Services (KERIS) in 1999. The mission of KERIS is the development, management and provision of education and research information at the national level through (1) management of the Research Infor- mation Sharing Union, (2) management of the integrated retrieval system, (3) digital thesis collection and dissemination, (4) the development of a research information database, and (5) the management of the interlibrary lending system (L2L). In 2001, 155 university

libraries were participating in the KERIS system with a total of 5.4 million bibliographic records.

In 1998, the China Academic Library and Information System (CALIS) was established with funding from the government; seventy university libraries participated, with core subject- centres at Beijing University, Tsinghua University, the China Agriculture University and the Beijing Medical University as well as seven regional subcentres covering the whole country. The mission of CALIS is shared cataloguing, interlibrary lending,document delivery, documentdigiti- zation, providing an Internet portal (see por- tals and gateways), running an electronic- journal licensing consortium (see electronic journals), and so on.

Bibliographic utilities in East Asia share common obstacles such ascopyrightlegislation and copyright clearance mechanisms for document delivery as well as multimedia database creation.

Network governance has been a standing issue among organizations such as national libraries, national science and technology information centres, and academia. All of these institutions are affected by population structure, the price rise of publications in general and the price rise of online and printed journals in particular, licensing copyright clearance issues, professional education and training, and competence in developing new services.