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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