Tracking the History of Romani Publications: Challenges Presented by Flawed Data

Abstract

Romani is a language of northern Indic origin spoken natively by an estimated 2.5 million people, primarily in Eurasia but also in North America. The history of publication patterns in Romani has not been well documented. Extracting data about this history based on available information in large bibliographic databases such as OCLC WorldCat has been hampered by unfortunate misap- plication of certain language codes, making it all but impossible to filter search results efficiently using Romani language as a param- eter. The author discusses how he was able to correct much of this inaccurate data in OCLC WorldCat.