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Purpose: The problem of information loss inherent in the romanisation of Chinese, Japanese and Korean names is examined together with the problems it poses both to librarians who record book information and to library users who search for resources written in East Asian languages in a catalogue containing only romanised transcriptions. Methodology/approach: Firstly, we describe the writing systems used to write Chinese, Korean and Japanese, the romanisation standards for these languages, and the institutions providing authority data in Latin script. We then analyse the procedures for romanising East Asian proper names and then retrieving their original written form, and identify cases of information loss and irreversible transformations. As a case study, we present the difficulties encountered by librarians and users in the Library of the Department of Asian Studies of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana (part of the Central Humanities Library and as such using the COBISS system) when using only romanised data to organise and search for library holdings in East Asian languages. Results: Information loss occurs in all methods of romanisation of Chinese, Korean and Japanese proper names presented in the previous sections. In the case of the Library of the Department of Asian Studies, this is a burden to both librarians and library users. Research limitations: We analysed the problem of the irreversibility of East Asian script romanisation in theory and in a case study involving one library; a more detailed analysis of other cases of Latin script catalogues hindering the management and use of library holdings in non-Latin scripts could be the object of future research. Originality/practical implications: This is the first analysis of the problem of information loss in romanised catalogues of East Asian library holdings in Slovenia, with a proposal for a possible solution using the Unicode standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Besides the collective role of the library catalogue, by using technology it has also become important equipment for simplified searching within the library collection by library users. Being in order, the catalogue reflects a qualitative library, and it can contribute to a satisfying user experience. COMARC/H architecture, among other functions, provides a unified way of recording the quantity and location of the library stock within the library catalogue. The article points out the basic meaning of regularity of the data, put into the library catalogue, and also the meaning of professional knowledge and workplace responsibility at every point of work in the library, that results in a qualitative library catalogue. The library collection stocktaking as a part of the supervision is being placed into the process of library collection management, which, if done regularly, brings out a relevant and user-friendly library collection. The article shows the procedure of the library collection stocktaking using COBISS3/Inventura software architecture, used in a small public library. There are also some results of the library collection stocktaking added, showing a very small share of actually missing items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]