The National Bibliography of Indian Literature (NBIL) - Searching Tips
- Nearly 90% of the database consists of records transcribed directly
from the NBIL, a source that followed older cataloging
standards. The remaining 10% consists of records created according
to current standards set by the Library of Congress (LC). One
important difference is in the form of personal names. LC usually
provides the most commonly known form of a name. For example, LC
uses "Tagore, Rabindranath, 1861-1941" while NBIL has
the same Bengali author listed under "Thakur, Ravindranath,
1861-1941"
- The approach to transliteration from Indian languages into
roman script for the NBIL is slightly different from the LC
approach. Most notably, the silent "a" or shwa is included in LC
romanizition. For example, a particular Gujarati author appears as
"Dhruv, Anandsankar Bapubhai" in NBIL cataloging but
as "Dhruva, Anandasankara Bapubhai" in the full LC catalog
entries. As another example, the publisher "Nandakisor &
Bros." in the NBIL is transliterated as "Nandakisora
enda Bradarsa" by LC. You need to search using both
transliterations to retrieve all the records. Or better, you could
search on parts of the text strings to avoid the problem, searching
for "Dhruv" or "Nandaki" in these two cases.
- Only one string of concatenated characters may be entered for
searching in a field. For example, a search in the Title field for
the string "Dattopanta Apate lekhasangraha" will retrieve a
record while "Dattopanta" plus "lekhasangraha" will
not retrieve anything.
- City of publication was usually normalized to the English form in
the NBIL.
- To search by a language, use the three letter language codes
below.
Language Codes for Searching the NBIL
An alphabetical list by codes based on the USMARC language codes (Rev. 1989)
Language |
Code |
Language |
Code |
Language |
Code |
Assamese |
asm |
Bengali |
ben |
Dogri |
doi |
English |
eng |
Gujarati |
guj |
Hindi |
hin |
Kannada |
kan |
Kashmiri |
kas |
Konkani |
kok |
Maithili |
mai |
Malayalam |
mal |
Manipuri |
mni |
Marathi |
mar |
Nepali |
nep |
Oriya |
ori |
Panjabi |
pan |
Rajasthani |
raj |
Sanskrit |
san |
Sindhi |
snd |
Tamil |
tam |
Telugu |
tel |
Urdu |
urd |
|
|
|
This page was last generated on
Monday 18 February 2013 at
18:34
by dsal@uchicago.edu
The URL of this page is: https://dsal.uchicago.edu/bibliographic/nbil/searchingtips.html