good cataloging software with East Asian languages romanization (Library of Congress)

[aldomenguzzi]

Hello,

my question is not exactly related to ebooks, although it is closely related to book digitization and cataloging.
I am looking for a piece of software that can catalog paper books (and ebooks for that matter) fetching data from databases that include East Asian language transcription (romanization). One of such databases is that of the Library of Congress.
Ideally the software should support bar-code scanners and allow me to print individual data sheets to put inside the books and export the cataloged book database.
Thank you very much

P.s. in case the question is too off topic, can someone also suggest a good forum where these things are discussed?
Cheers

[Kumabjorn]

Any software that supports Unicode should be able to handle romanization of East Asian languages. The only thing you need to set manually is how they will handle characters with macrons and diacritics, should they be included with their regular character or as a separate character? Will you need multiple entries? For example; 夏目漱石 will be なつめそうせき in Hiragana but could be written as ナツメソーセキ in Katakana. The former would be romanized as Natsume Sōseki or Natsume Souseki, whereas the romanization of Katakana would be Natsume Soseki. You could risk ending up with different entries for the same author spread out in the catalog.

[aldomenguzzi]

Thank you very much for the reply.
My problem is that I don't know of any book cataloging software that handles Unicode (I tried Collectorz and Book Librarian Plus and both failed).
Thank you for pointing out the dangers of transliteration, I wasn't yet paying attention to the problem but it is something to be careful about. I didn't know that the long o in Katakana gets transliterated with a short o, I always made it long (ナツメソーセキ Natsume Sōseki). Are you sure it is usually done this way?
Apart from this issue, do you know of any good piece of software?
I have volunteered to prepare the cards and an excel file for a librarian that doesn't know East Asian languages (more specifically Japanese and Korean) but I don't want to spend my afternoons inputting data that is already present in the Library of Congress. I tried copying and pasting from the Library of Congress site, but since I have a bar-code scanner available, I would like to do the job a bit more speedily.
Cheers

[Kumabjorn]

EndNote is a good piece of software for mining book data. The question is what kind of parameters you are going to use.
The katakana transliteration is a remnant of Meiji so it kind of depends on what kind of books you are going to put in. Also, this transliteration is what is used in academic writing to show that it comes from katakana, if the books are of the vernacular kind you probably don't need to pay attention to it.

[aldomenguzzi]

Thank for the explanation. I didn't quite get the point where you say that the lack of diacritic for the long, apart from deriving from old Meiji era transliteration, is used to show that the word comes from a Katakana word ?!(I must have understood something wrong). But perhaps this is not the best place to discuss the issue, in case you could send me a link od a PM if you have time.
Gong back to the software, basically I would like to create library cards (and have their info on digital format as well), that have the roman character transliteration, diacritics included, so that the librarian could put the cards wherever they need to go (I think he needs them to write in pencil the transliterated title on the first page of the book) and a file with the digital data that can be added to the main database.
Can Endnote do this, I mean fetch data with the transliteration from the Library of Congress Catalog?