Unicode: support for multiple languages at the Ohio State University Libraries

Abstract

Unicode is a standard for a universal character set for all of the scripts of the world’s languages It is one of the fundamental technological building blocks for international exchange of textual information, via computers. It is particularly important to libraries that house collections in many languages and written in various scripts. Ohio State University Libraries houses collections written in many non‐Latin scripts including Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Cyrillic. Providing patrons with access to these materials has become much easier with the incorporation of Unicode into library systems and software. This article describes what needs to be in place on personal computers and in the library system in order to take advantage of Unicode as well as providing some guidelines to troubleshoot problems when they occur.