CJK Help for Socrates Users

General Information | Chinese | Korean

General Information

Socrates adopted Unicode in January 2008, with CJK capabilities implemented in September 2008. Unicode is a widely accepted international standard for the encoding of characters used in the world’s languages and scripts. For more information about Unicode, please visit http//www.unicode.org.

For help with displaying characters, printing and e-mailing records, and searching, please see the Unicode Help for Socrates Users page. This help page provides information to Socrates users on how to obtain the best results when using catalog records that include diacritics, special characters, and information written in non-Latin scripts when accessing Socrates away from a Library kiosk. A primary reason for adopting Unicode is to make Socrates a multi-script system, thus enhancing its effectiveness as a search tool for the library’s collections.

Searching in Chinese script

Please note that most, but not all, records have the author, title and publisher fields in both romanized Chinese and Chinese script. For the most accurate and comprehensive results, use romanized Chinese search.
Simplified and traditional Chinese records are inter-searchable ONLY in Keyword search (default setting in Socrates). For example, search for “张爱玲” or “張愛玲” as keyword search will retrieve records in both simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. However, Browse search is limited to particular indexes for a specific language and will only pull up records in that index. So simplified Chinese “张爱玲” will result records in simplified Chinese, whereas traditional Chinese “張愛玲” pull up records in traditional Chinese.
Terms may be combined using Boolean operators (and, or, not) to expand or focus searches. Term adjacency is treated as “and” and no particular order. For example, 中国经济政策 as keyword search will retrieve records with all three terms “中国”, “经济” and “政策” appear in the records, no matter where they appear. For exact phrase searching, use single quote ‘’, such as ‘中国经济政策’, to search records with all three terms in the exact adjacency in the searching term.
Do not include punctuation and Chinese angled brackets 《》 in the Chinese script searching terms.
There is a known problem that clicking on a hyperlink in traditional Chinese retrieves a full set of results, but clicking on a hyperlink in simplified Chinese will only retrieve other records that have the heading in simplified Chinese. This has been reported to the vendor and is pending resolution.

Searching in Korean Script

The Korean language on records in Socrates is shown in romanized script (see ALA-LC Romanization Tables - Korean). In addition, some basic bibliographic information (author, title, publisher, etc.) is also provided in Korean characters (Hangul) or Chinese characters (Hancha). Search terms in the Korean language can be entered using romanized script or Korean script. However, searching Korean records using Korean script in Socrates has several limitations. Some improvements are planned for the future. The major issues are as follows:

1. Spacing of Korean text

The spacing of Korean text on records in Socrates does not follow the standard rules for spacing in writing Korean. The Korean text has either spaces corresponding with the romanized fields, following the word division rules specified in the ALA-LC Romanization Tables, or no spaces at all between Korean words. Currently, space does matter when searching Socrates using Korean script. Therefore, it is recommended to search Korean words both with and without spaces in order to retrieve more records that are relevant to a search.

Some examples are displayed below.

Browse by Title search for 한국인의 대미인식 (space is given following the Korean standard) does not retrieve the record.

Browse by Title search for 한국인 의 대미 인식 (spaces are given following the ALA-LC Romanization Tables) retrieves the record.

On the other hand, Browse by Title search for “일제 식민지 정책 과 식민지 근대화론 비판” (spaces are given following the ALA-LC Romanization Tables) will not retrieve the record.

Entering the title without spaces “일제식민지정책과식민지근대화론비판” will retrieve the record. This is because the title has been written without spaces in the record.

Search Everything (or Title Keyword search) for 통계 retrieves only the records in which the word 통계 is separated from any other words by space. For example, “식민권력과통계” (no space between words) is not retrieved, because “통계” in “식민권력과통계” is not recognized as an individual word.

2. Korean characters (Hangul) and Chinese characters (Hancha)

Korean books often write their titles and authors’ names in Hancha. If a book has the title and author written in Hancha, so does the record in Socrates. However, Socrates does not perform cross mapping between Hangul and Hancha. If search terms are entered in Hangul, only the records that include the terms in Hangul will be retrieved. Vice versa. Therefore, it is recommended to search Korean records using both Hangul and Hancha in order to retrieve more records that are relevant to a search.

Search Everything (or Title Keyword search) for “대한 민국” does not retrieve any records in which Korean script “대한 민국” is not included, for example, “重慶大韓民國臨時政府史.”

Recommendations for Searching by Korean Script

Considering the limitations described above, the following search methods are currently recommended in order to search the records in Korean.

enter search terms in romanized script
enter search terms in Korean characters both with and without spacing
enter search terms in both Korean characters (Hangul) and Chinese characters (Hancha)

Please contact Kyungmi Chun, the Korean Studies Librarian, for any questions regarding Korean searching.