As discussed in earlier Unicode presentations, the ISO10646/Unicode standards and the tools that have been developed upon them have opened a new era in global multilingual computing and information retrieval. We are witnessing the impact of that change in current Library Automation systems, globalized University administration and the day-to- day practices of teaching and research. I am privileged to be an active participant as Operations Manager of the American University of Armenia Corporation and as US Project Manager of the Digital Library for Classical Armenian Literature.

With the generous support of a private donor, that project aims to share the richness of Armenian culture and heritage on a global basis with Armenians and non-Armenians alike. It also raises broader issues for the Humanities and students of writing and encoding systems.

This session will develop themes from my earlier presentations in greater depth. I will continue to explore the multi-disciplinary inter-relationships between character set encodings, linguistics, and the technology-assisted transmission of knowledge and culture.

I will explore some of the issues pertaining to the encoding of cuneiform characters in ISO10646, as an outgrowth of the encoding work for Armenian.