Chinese Studies

This guide is to help library users with the basics of Chinese romanization and facilitate the search of the caralog with Pinyin or Chinese characters:

1. Which Romanization system to use?
2. How to search the catalog in Pinyin?
3. How to search the catalog in Chinese characters?

1.Which Romanization system to use?

Duke catalog adopts Pinyin as the way to display Romanized content of the bibliographic records. The Pinyin system has replaced the Wade-Giles system as the standard in libraries in North America for creating Latin script readings for Chinese characters. This means, in general, library users must search in Pinyin to find Chinese-language materials, regardless of publishing locations. Please consult the Wade-Giles to Zhuyin to Pinyin Conversion Table.

2. How to search the catalog with Pinyin?

The ALA-LC Romanization Table for Chinese contains details on when to join or separate syllables when you enter Pinyin to search for Chinese materials. You may need to familiar yourself with it in order to do effective and efficient search. If you are more familiar with Wade-Giles or Zhuyin, you may refer to the Wade-Giles to Zhuyin to Pinyin Conversion Table. for help. In general, enter the Pinyin for each Chinese character with a space, such as Ying Han Da Ci Dian for 英漢大詞典；Jing Ji Gai Ge for 經濟改革. However, there are certain situations where you need to join syllables, examples:

3. How to search the catalog with Chinese characters?  

There are two ways to search in Chinese characters. The first is a browse search using an index for Chinese titles or authors. These searches are limited to titles in a specific language and won't pull up titles in the other languages. To do this, go to Advanced search, click on browse an alphabetical list, and then select the appropriate index from the drop down list.

It is also possible to do a keyword search from the simple search screen. Chinese searches entered in keyword searches retrieve records across Chinese, Japanese and Korean.  Terms can be combined using Boolean operators; you can also combine terms in different languages -- Chinese characters, Japanese kana, Korean Hangul and English.  Character adjacency is the default, so combining characters will produce results for the compound not the single characters.