Should libraries specify Unicode conformity in their RFPs? Only libraries with machine-readable records for materials in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean should specify Unicode conformity, but all librarians should be aware that Unicode is gradually supplanting the ASCII character coding format that has been in use in the United States for several decades.
Before Unicode was developed, hundreds of different encoding schemes could assign the numbers that represent letters and other characters in a computer. At least 20 were in use in the European Union alone. No single encoding could contain enough characters to cover all the world's languages. The encoding systems also conflicted with one another because they often used the same number for two different characters, or used different numbers for the same character. Unicode provides a unique number for every character.
Unlike ASCII, which has been the basic encoding scheme used in most automated library systems developed in the United States and uses 8 bits for each character, Unicode uses 16 bits, so it can represent more than 65,000 unique characters.
Almost all computer manufacturers, operating system developers, and browser producers have adopted Unicode. It is required by modern standards such as XIML and Java. The first automated library system vendors to implement Unicode were those that marketed to large research libraries with collections in many different scripts, but as the library automation industry became increasingly more international, most vendors launched Unicode development efforts so they would not be excluded from any market.
Unicode should be available from most vendors by 2002. Although ASCII support will probably continue for several years, Unicode may displace it within five years because Unicode can do everything ASCII can, and more.
The best source of detailed and authoritative information about Unicode is the Web site of the Unicode Consortium at www.unicode.org. The Consortium is a nonprofit organization founded to develop, extend, and promote use of the Unicode standard, a standard jointly developed with ISO.
