Library and Information Science

Ministry of Education's Gakuzyutu Yogosyu (Japanese Scientific Terms) was prompted by the postwar reform of national orthography. Its Library Science section was published in 1958 after 12-year efforts of the Subcommittee on Library Terms, Council for the Encouragement of Science, Ministry of Education.

As candidate vocabulary the A. L. A. Glossary (1943) was first selected and in addition to this the, Unesco Vocabularium (1953) was adopted afterwards. The published vocabulary, is composed of Japanese-English and English-Japanese parts, Japanese terms being printed both in Romanized and orthographic forms.

Terms pertinent to classification were extracted from these three vocabularies and it was found that terms from the A. L. A. Glossary [A] are almost completely contained in the Yogosyu [M]. Then [M] was compared with Unesco terms [U], which seem to contribute to [M] by about 70% including 20% common to [A].

As to distribution of terms by category, [U] is richer in fundamental and structural terms. For reference B. C. Vickery's Faceted Classification (1960) and D. J. Foskett's Classification for a General Indexing Language (1970) were consulted. The former gives a number of essential terms relative to structure and notation, and the latter to categories and relations.