Do you ever wonder what the magical worlds you’ve read about could look like for other fans around our world? Centennial High School in Champaign, Ill., asked for some of these stories to be cataloged by the Cataloging Maintenance Center. Most of the books that have been cataloged were originally written in English and have been translated into Korean. The books that Centennial HS has sent to the CMC so far are all from series you may have heard of: Harry Potter, the Twilight Saga, and the Divergent series.

To catalog these books, the CMC had to utilize a few resources. First, there is an excellent tool available through the National Institute of Korean Language that showed the catalogers the Romanization of Korean, a way of transcribing the Korean language into the Latin script used in English, basing Romanization on Korean pronunciation. This tool was especially useful when looking at the different volumes of Harry Potter (The Prisoner of Azkaban, The Goblet of Fire), where translations of the titles varied in online sources. Also, the CMC utilized Lexilogos, which is a translation database, OCLC Connexion, and OCLC Bibliographic Formats and Standards.

Cataloger Mary Cornell has included some examples of books cataloged here. The most intriguing quality of these books, beyond the translators’ admirable work, is the artwork. Also included is a title page from one of the Harry Potter volumes to give a glimpse of a cataloger’s view. Do you have world language materials or a special collection such as this that your library needs cataloged? Contact the Cataloging Maintenance Center at cmc@illinoisheartland.org to see if your items qualify for this free service!