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Abstract

Indian Multilingual Bibliographic Database Problem: An Overview

Rajesh Chandrakar - Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET)Centre

Intended Audience: Software Engineers, Systems Analysts, Multilingual Database Developers
Session Level: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced

India is a country with rich diversity in languages, cultures, customs and religions. The number of languages listed for India is 418. Of those, 407 are living languages and 11 are extinct. Eighteen are constitutionally recognized languages written in a variety of scripts. These varieties of cultures stored in print media as manuscripts, monographs, pamphlet, copper plates(Tamra Patra), palm leafs etc and spread over the country. INFLIBNET(Information and Library Network) Centre in national level working together with various academic institutes towards digitizing the resources across the country for developing national union databases for library resources. In addition to, some other network centres such as DELNET(Developing Library Network, New Delhi), BONET(Bombay Library Network, Mumbai), CALIBNET(Calcutta Library Network, Kolkatta), etc working separately city-wise in regional level. In terms of multilingual databases, creation of multilingual database is the problem being faced by these network centres. Not even these network centres, other academic institutes are also in the same problematic route. In Indian context, BIS (Bureau of Indian Standard) has introduced standard called "ISCII-88 (Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange)" and modified version ISCII-91 conforms to the norms prescribed in Unicode. As Unicode is a Universal Character Set of over 1,000,000 possible values seems perfect crossroad for multilingual creation with different forms such as UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. With this paper, author tries to elaborate the problems of multilingual bibliographic database creation in Indian context and seeks better solution from the Unicode forum. In addition to, author explains his view for finding solution.


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