Since its inception in 1989, the American University of Armenia has become a two way bridge between the Republic of Armenia (ROA) and the Universities of the United States(US). This has resulted in the merging of indigenous technologies in Armenia and those imported from the United States. As reported in prior Unicode conferences, this has led to the standardization of Armenian character set encodings and work on automated transliteration. Among other projects, current work is in progress on the creation of a Digital Library of Armenian Classical Armenian literature from the rich holdings of the national Armenian repository for historic manuscripts and documents the Matenadaran.

The Digital Library is designed to make those unique holdings available to a world-wide audience via the World Wide Web. Preliminary data may be viewed at www.digilib.am. Work is in progress on the creation of the multilingual databases necessary to support this project in 8-bit Armenian national character encodings and in 16-bit UNICODE encodings.

The presentation will summarize prior work on UNICODE normalization , character set issues, and localization and will demonstrate various aspects of a UNICODE oriented applications development.

It will focus on both the software engineering issues and the issues pertaining to the development of a multi-lingual Digital Library for worldwide audiences. This will include attention to computer assisted linguistic analysis and a comparison of contemporary localization problems and those posed at the time of the cuneiform writing system.