Romani (Romany) and Romanian Language Codes

There is a persistent problem in OCLC where cataloging agencies are using the incorrect language code to represent the Romanian language. The language code frequently and incorrectly applied is rom, however rom is the code for Romani, not Romanian, for which the code is rum. This has resulted in thousands of Romanian items being incorrectly tagged as Romani. Some of these erroneous codes have be fixed, but many will probably remain incorrect indefinitely, as there is no reliable automatic way to fix these and manual intervention is required.

For more information on this problem please consult: Husic, Geoff. Tracking the History of Romani Publications: Challenges Presented by Flawed Data. Slavic & East European Information Resources, 13: 230–234, 2012 (Open-access archived version)

Revised: June 2016