Cyrillic Transliteration and its Users

A wide diversity exists in the current practice of transliterating Cyrillic scripts for use in bibliographic records in online catalogs. Without knowing which transliteration table was used, it is difficult to retrieve the desired record successfully or efficiently. Retrieving an item (e.g., titles or an author's name) from a library's online catalog (OPAC) where it is given only in transliterated form can be a confusing task, even for users who know the Russian language or at least the Cyrillic alphabet. This study explores the problems besetting three groups of Russian-language students faced with romanized Cyrillic bibliographic records. It also tries to investigate students' ability in searching the Russian records romanized according to the Library of Congress (LC) transliteration table. Analysis of the test results show the students' success-and-error rate before and after instruction. The findings of this study establish that transliteration is one of the factors limiting access _by Russian language students to the Slavic collections.