The Hijri Calendar is the Islamic lunar (Qamari) calendar. Its first year starts with Muhammad's Hijra (622 CE), beginning with the month of Muharram.
The Shamsi Calendar (also called the Khorshidi calendar) is the solar Hijri calendar and is the official calendar of Iran, beginning its year on March 21 (the vernal equinox, Nowruz). Adopted in 1925 by the Pahlavi dynasty, it also begins in 622 CE.
The Rumi Calendar, based on the Julian Calendar, was officially used by the Ottoman Empire after the Tanzimat Reforms (1839) and by the Republic of Turkey until 1926. It is a solar based calendar.
Princeton University Library uses American Library Association and Library of Congress (ALA-LC) approved Romanization Tables for their transliterations of Arabic, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, Syriac, Urdu, and Yiddish languages into Roman script.
If you are having trouble locating works in your Main Catalog search, check to be sure you are using the correct transliteration. Links to PDFs of the current ALA-LC approved Romanization Tables for selected languages are listed below.
The relative value of script vs Romanization
Searching in Arabic script alone is not always reliable in the library catalog or the Worldcat database. Searching proper nouns (titles, authors) in both script and transliteration helps you, the researcher, access as many of our resources that are relevant to your research as possible. For more on this double-approach to proper noun searches, see catalog searching tips for Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Hebrew.
Searching in Arabic script is more reliable due to the pronunciation of Arabic words that varies from country to other and how it was romanized.
The following describes searching in Worldcat, a global catalog of library materials, but this information is also useful for library catalog searching.
Specific Arabic characters that are problematic in WorldCat
The diacritics of Romanized characters are not consistent. There is a mixture of ALA Romanization rules in both Unicode and non-Unicode characters set, in addition to non-ALA Romanized diacritics. We can detect non Unicode characters (2 characters to form one Arabic diacritical characters like ā which is a + ¯ Macron diacritics versus 1 character in Unicode ā ) i.e. Daqāʼiq al-ʻArabīyah versus Daqāʼiq al-ʻArabīyah . Apparently they are similar but you can discover the difference if you try to erase the character by using the back space key. This doesn’t affect the search results.
The problematic characters are: āáḍḥṣṭūẓ Ā Ḍ Ḥ Ī Ṣ Ṭ Ū Ẓ both small and capital forms.
Use or non-use of Arabic stop words
Lām al-Taʿrīf (alif-lām) is a controversial issue: In some library systems like Millennium the system will omit the al-taʿrīf automatically in order to enable retrieval of titles with or without al-taʿrīf . Maybe it is useful to use the same practice in WorldCat .
It is advisable not to skip the stop words in Arabic like (min, ilā, ʿalā) from title search. You can skip them from Keyword search. As for waw (conjunction) is advisable to be separated with a space from the word if the word includes al-taʿrīf because the system will disregard any stop word like waw as first step then al-taʿrīf in second step during the indexing process.
i.e. الحقيقة و الخيال
The number of hits in the results with al-taʿrīf is not always equal to the number of hits without al-taʿrīf in Title search.
Examples of discrepancies in the number of hits in results of Title search due to al-taʿrīf in title search:
الخيال = 409
والخيال = 84
و الخيال = 33
خيال = 471
