Multi‐script bibliographic database: an Indian perspective

In this Internet era, when everything is going on the Web, character encoding becomes an issue for developers and facilitators. This matter also concerns India, as a country with rich diversity in languages, cultures, customs and religions, which are stored in print media as manuscripts, monographs, pamphlet, tamra‐patras (copper plates), palm leaves etc. Library and information networks in India hold the responsibility to digitise all those valuable resources stored in print media and make them accessible to users through the Web. However, due to technology limitations, so far it has not been practical to do so. This paper tries to explain the limitations and problems being faced in this regard, highlights the issues involved with multi‐script database creation and the required state‐of‐the‐art technology. Finally, Unicode is considered as a solution as it is a Universal Character Set for character encoding.