Correction to:

The only serious competitor to the LC scheme, however, is the ISO scheme (first edition published in 1984) which has been adopted by the United Kingdom’s branch of the Middle East Libraries Committee and by other European library committees.

Corrected text supplied by the author (02/10/2006):

The ILO standard has been adopted as the official British standard for romanization of Arabic (BS4280) (although MELCOM UK has agreed on the adoption of LC romanization tables), and outside the English-speaking world the national standards for romanization of Arabic in many Euopean countries are also based on ISO (Vernon, p. 11).

We are grateful to Paul Auchterloine for having noticed the error and bringing it to our attention in an email:

From:Paul Auchterlonie
To:
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2006 12:59:20 +0000 (GMT Standard Time)
Dear Mr. Rodgers,

At our MELCOM (UK) meeting yesterday, it was pointed out by Geoffrey
Roper that in the latest number of MELA Notes (no. 78) there is a
statement that "the ISO scheme...has been adopted by the United
Kingdom's branch of the Middle East Libraries Committee and by other
European library committees" (p. 56).

I cannot speak for other countries, but no UK university or national
library uses ISO transliteration for Arabic or Persian, or has done
so for twenty years. I was present at the MELCOM meeting in Oxford in
the mid-1980s when the Committee discussed the issue of recommending
a transliteration scheme to all its member libraries. As it was felt
that the future lay in shared cataloguing and that North American
libraries would be supplying the bulk of new records for Middle
Eastern languages, the Committee decided to recommend LC
transliteration and this has been our policy ever since, to which all
member libraries of university or national status have adhered. All
libraries contributing to COPAC (the online union catalogue of
members of the UK Consortium of Research Libraries, plus the British
Library and the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales) have
submitted their records for material in Arabic and Persian in LC
transliteration since COPAC began in the 1990s, and there is no
reason to believe that any library is contemplating changing.

MELCOM (UK) feels that readers of MELA Notes should not misled by a
factual error of such fundamental importance. I would be grateful if,
as editor of the journal, you could incorporate a correction to
Blair Kuntz's statement in the next issue of MELA Notes.

With best wishes,

Paul Auchterlonie.

----------------------
Paul Auchterlonie
Chair MELCOM (UK)
University of Exeter
Old Library
Prince of Wales Road
Exeter EX4 4SB
U.K.