Internationalisation of the BISIS Library Information System
Milan Vidakovic, Assistant Professor, University of Novi Sad, Serbia and Montenegro
Intended Audience: Software Engineers, Web Administrators, Web Designers
Session Level: Beginner, Intermediate
This paper represents the process of internationalisation and localization of the librarian information system BISIS developed at the University of Novi Sad. This process comprises of three segments: database localisation, Java GUI applications localisation, and Web application localisation. Since all applications are made in Java, system uses Unicode and Java internationalisation library. Besides Unicode, BISIS also uses UNIMARC standard as a standard for description and storage of librarian records. UNIMARC standard enables an efficient conversion of different letters and a joint search over several alphabets. As a final result, the BISIS system enables the analogous use of several alphabets (Cyrillic, Latin and Greek in particular) for input and display, and for defining query text, meaning that the same results can be obtained with the same query but in a different alphabet. This approach is especially useful if the original alphabet of the librarian record is not known. The benefit of this approach is multilingual library information system with simple and powerful database search.