This guide focuses on searching and finding Hebraica materials in Find, Penn’s Online Library Catalog. The term "Hebraica" refers to languages using the Hebrew character set, e.g., Hebrew, Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino). It chiefly covers Hebrew materials. It is not meant as a comprehensive guide on using catalog. For the latter, please see the guide, Using the Library Catalog
Penn's Hebraica collection in the Libraries goes back centuries. For most of those years, Hebraica titles were cataloged using only transliteration ("romanization"), i.e., representation of Hebrew letters with roman ones. (ex.: קופסה שחורה = kufsah shehorah)
Only in the late 1980s did U.S. libraries first get the capability to add Hebrew script alongside the romanized fields in library records, thus representing what is actually on the title page. It is important to remember that all titles cataloged prior to the late 1980's are in romanized form only, without Hebrew script.
Subject headings are always in English, following Library of Congress Subject Headings (ex.: Hebrew literature, Modern – History and criticism).
Entries for titles are always by Library of Congress (LC) romanization. Entries for authors are established by cataloging rules, and names are maintained in a National Authority File for the sake of uniformity among all libraries.
