Service Quality Improvement Council

Report from the sub-committee on Vernacular (Non-Roman) Support to SQIC

Our original charge (condensed version):

"…the outcome of the group's deliberations should be a report to the SQI-C before mid-July in which the group identifies what issues should be a concern, which public workstations [in SML as well as any of the School and

Department Libraries] should be equipped with the necessary changes to provide reader access to vernacular script, and what do service staff need to know."

What issues are concerns?

We need to implement working configurations of public workstations to use IE and/or Netscape to display vernacular scripts (CJK/Hebrew/Arabic/Thai) and any other vernacular that has fonts available for display.

What will we do?

Workstations will be configured with all known fonts used under IE and Netscape to display vernacular scripts. The WSG will keep track of release of new fonts and install them during our normal maintenance of public machines (winter recess and summer break). Global IME will be installed to allow the input of CJK.

When?

Summer 2000, completion before 9/1/00. Work has already begun in the PRR and CCL Classroom.

Where?

All workstations in the SML PRR. Workstations installed to accommodate patrons with disabilities in A&A, SSL, GovDocs, KSL, CCL, Music and Engineering will be configured to support the vernacular. All new public workstations installed as part of the current equipment request process will be configured to support the vernacular as will all future machines. We will recommend that Medical also make such a machine available. Machines will be configured in the CCL classroom and the SCML.

Why these workstations:

The fonts available work with IE and Netscape under NT and are very large. The unicode font is over 25MB. Running these fonts on our lower-end public workstations would lead to frustration at best, it would crash the machines at worse. The fonts also do not display well on lower-end monitors. The PRR has the memory and the monitors to display these fonts correctly. *New* public workstations can be enabled with the fonts, we cannot retrofit all our older ones. The current locations were chosen based on our belief of need. The MAC's are not very high-end machines, we would not want to install this capability on them, even if we could figure out how to do it.

What do service staff need to know?

Service staff need to be aware of the availability of these workstations and direct readers to them if necessary. Staff should understand the basics of what is installed on these machines. We will provide a web site with basic instructions for public service staff. For more detailed information on the use of these machines, readers should be referred to the Curatorial units.

Note: The support of the vernacular is an every-moving target with the browsers. Not all languages display correctly even in IE at the present time, we will monitor changes and make updates as they become available. But we do believe that a large majority of the languages will display correctly.

I have contacted ITS and the Center for Language Study (CLS is guiding the efforts in the ITS clusters) in regards to their position on vernacular support. Information on what they are doing is located at: http://www.yale.edu/multilingual/. Like the Library, they are monitoring the updates as they come along and looking to enhanced support with Windows 2000. (We hope to have prototype Windows 2000 machines in the SML Nave during the fall.) I will continue to keep in touch with these groups so we all aware of developments/installations/problems/issues that we all might face.

Karen Reardon
Manager of Workstation Support
Library Systems Office