Searching for Non-English Language Materials: Scripts, Diacritics, Numerals and Dates
- Overview
- Searching with non-Latin script
- Searching with romanization
- Searching with diacritics
- Numerals and dates
- Standards and conversion tools
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Use the library’s "Find a Specialist" tool to identify a librarian with expertise in your language. Search by language and then click through to the librarian's profile.
Romanization versus non-Latin script
The U-M Library’s online catalog records always contain the Latin script transliteration (or romanization) of authors, titles, and publication information for non-Latin script collection material. In many cases, non-Latin script data is also provided in records and available for display and searching. However, many of our older records contain only romanized script.
For example, this keyword search in the library catalog for the romanized name “Pushkin” retrieves many more results than this keyword search for “Пушкин,” the original Russian Cyrillic form of the name.
Pro tip: Enter search terms in romanization for more comprehensive results, and in non-Latin script as an entry point to find examples of how your keywords are romanized in the catalog.
Non-Latin script in the online catalog
When non-Latin script is included in a catalog record in the U-M Library online catalog, it is paired with corresponding romanized data for the following types of data/fields: Author, Title, Place of publication, Publisher, Series, Notes, and sometimes subject headings.
See an example of paired Chinese characters and romanized Chinese in this record in the library catalog.
See an example of paired Arabic script and romanized Arabic in this record in the library catalog.
Pro tip: If you search the U-M Catalog using non-Latin script characters, the most effective searches are for Author, Title, and Publisher.