Migration of the Unicorn database to Unicode

Unicode is a character encoding standard that "covers all the characters for all the writing systems of the world, modern and ancient. It also includes technical symbols, punctuations, and many other characters used in writing text. The Unicode Standard is intended to support the needs of all types of users, whether in business or academia, using mainstream or minority scripts." http://www.unicode.org/

In particular, Unicode would allow us to search and display data in non-Roman scripts in Socrates. This would potentially include Chinese, Japanese and Korean, Slavic languages written in the Cyrillic alphabet, and Middle Eastern languages written in other scripts, e.g., Arabic and Hebrew.

SULAIR's database for bibliographic information is called Unicorn, and is supported by Sirsi Corporation. In mid-2006 Sirsi will make available an upgrade to Unicorn that will support the Unicode character standard. We plan to upgrade to this version over the second half of 2006 and 2007, culminating in reloading our records from RLG's RLIN database for titles which have vernacular data in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew and Yiddish.