Unicode turn, BULAC experience.

BULAC, the Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations (in English : University Library for Language and Civilization Studies) will open to the public in 2010. It will offer a wide range of documentary resources on Non-Western languages and civilizations to students and researchers. These resources are at present scattered in many locations and are to be gathered in the new library. The primary aim of the project is to build a common multi-script catalogue. We had first of all to convert data from previous computerized catalogues (several formats, several character sets). We purchased consequently an integrated library system in 2003. This library system was decided to be unimarc and unicode compliant according to our specifications. The catalogue was launched in july 2005. It contains by now CJK, Cyrillic, Greek and Latin scripts. But, we had many difficulties with the character sets conversion. We had also to understand Unicode principles. The catalogue is now working properly. But we have to improve the index rules and we have also to implement many other scripts in the catalogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]