The Harvard-Yenching Library, which houses the University’s prime collection of East Asian books and documents, eagerly awaits the new system’s language capabilities.

“The HOLLIS system has more than 600,000 CJK records,” said Harvard-Yenching Librarian James K.M. Cheng. “It will be a tremendous help to faculty, students and scholars...to be able to search the new HOLLIS database with CJK vernacular characters.”

He said Harvard-Yenching staff have been actively designing and testing the system’s ability to handle searches with CJK characters.

Robinson said that in the future the libraries hope to implement Arabic, Cyrillic and other non-Roman scripts.

In the 1990s, Robinson said, Harvard University Library realized the old HOLLIS system would not fit well with the digital library environment of the future. She said the old HOLLIS system, fully automated in the 1980s, has not only been hard to maintain but also is not a “good player” in a networked world of personal computers.

Harvard libraries signed a contract with Ex-Libris, the company that makes ALEPH 500, in November 2000. Robinson said Harvard decided to purchase ALEPH 500 in part because the program had already been sold to libraries at other large research universities, including MIT.

Robinson, who worked on the installation of the original HOLLIS system, said this transition differs from that of the mid-1980s—a time when the libraries were gradually moving from a punch card or non-automated system to an automated one.

“The impact is much less because we are moving from one automated environment to another,” she said.

—Staff writer Nalina Sombuntham can be reached at sombunth@fas.harvard.edu.