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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate issues of different scripts in the same record (in MARC21 and Chinese machine‐readable cataloguing (CMARC)) and Chinese internal codes (i.e. double‐byte character set) when implementing Koha. It also discusses successful efforts in promoting the adoption of Koha in Taiwan, particularly the contributions from Koha‐Taiwan.

A Koha CMARC/MARC21 testbed was set up to discuss issues of multi‐scripts and Chinese internal codes when implementing Koha, and to determine to what extent the various features of CMARC, which are not present in MARC21, such as linking fields, can be supported in Koha and what is required to implement them if they are not available.

In contrast to western characters, Chinese internal codes cause extra work, as special programming for character conversion is required when working with Koha. This situation is commonly seen in Asian countries such as China, Japan and Korea. This paper recommends implementing CMARC, MARC21 or even any other type of MARC format in Koha with strong commercial‐level support.

Koha‐Taiwan serves Koha Chinese users around the world. A successful Koha‐Taiwan could be a model around the world.

In recent years, the concept of implementing an open‐source library management system has been coming to the fore. In Taiwan, the local‐based commercial library system covers more than one quarter of the library system market in academic libraries because the company provides better tailor‐made support, mainly in scripts and multiple internal codes, than do western‐based commercial library systems. Evaluations and conclusions from this paper will be useful to countries where multi‐scripts and double‐byte character sets are issues.

The purpose of this paper is to provide broad overviews of functional requirements for bibliographic records (FRBR) in the context of Chinese machine-readable cataloguing (CMARC). It examines areas of the FRBR model, FRBR system development, FRBR applications and FRBR research.

A Chinese Koha_LibFRBR testbed was set up to develop three activities: building a FRBR application function library called LibFRBR to maintain FRBRized bibliographic records, implementing a mapping algorithm between CMARC/MARC 21 and FRBR, and designing a new generation Chinese FRBR Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) user interface.

The pilot system implementation demonstrates a workable process with useful output using both automated means (through a Perl module) and manual means (through a cataloguing interface (CI)). The study shows that existing poor Relator Code system and the maintenance of very little authority data in libraries in Taiwan are disadvantages in utilizing the FRBR model.

The software modules developed by this research have been released in GitHub through Koha-Taiwan distributed with a General Public License for further application within the Koha community.

The concrete research outcomes include: providing workable practices for CMARC coding information in FRBR, developing FRBRization of Chinese Koha library management systems, developing FRBR tools including LibFRBR, an application function library used to convert bibliographic records into FRBRized structures in Koha, and FRBR CI for library cataloguers and providing a preliminary evaluation on the views of library cataloguers and OPAC users.

The National Bibliographic Information Network (NBINet) in Taiwan is a bibliographic database established on 30 October 1991 and maintained by the National Central Library. In 1998 there were 26 member libraries and 70 non‐member libraries in NBINet, which is considered a comprehensive database for Chinese studies worldwide and contains more than 1.6 million bibliographic records. This paper discusses the problems encountered in the establishment of NBINet and the solutions related to computers and networks, NBINet’s utilization on the Internet, and user expectations of NBINet.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate various issues related to Chinese language localisation in Evergreen, an open source integrated library system (ILS).

A Simplified Chinese version of Evergreen was implemented and tested and various issues such as encoding, indexing, searching, and sorting specifically associated with Simplified Chinese language were investigated.

The paper finds that Unicode eases a lot of ILS development problems. However, having another language version of an ILS does not simply require the translation from one language to another. Indexing, searching, sorting and other locale related issues should be tackled not only language by language, but locale by locale.

Most of the issues that have arisen during this project will be found with other ILS‐like systems.

This paper provides insights into issues of, and various solutions to, indexing, searching, and sorting in the Chinese language in an ILS. These issues and the solutions may be applicable to other digital library systems such as institutional repositories.