ALA-LC romanization

ALA-LC (American Library Association - Library of Congress) is a set of standards for romanization, or the representation of text in other writing systems using the Latin script.

Applications

This system is used to represent bibliographic information by North American libraries and the British Library (for acquisitions since 1975), and in publications throughout the English-speaking world.

The Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules require that catalogers Romanize access points from their non-Roman originals. However, as the MARC have been expanded to allow catalog records containing Unicode characters, many catalogers now include bibliographic data in both Roman and original scripts. The emerging Resource Description and Access continues many of AACR's Romanization recommendations, but refers to the process as "transliteration" rather than "Romanization."

Scripts

The ALA-LC Romanization includes over 70 Romanization tables. Some notable tables include: