Resolving the unencoded character problem for chinese digital libraries

Constructing a Chinese digital library, especially for a historical article archiving, is often bothered by the small character sets supported by the current computer systems. This paper is aimed at resolving the unencoded character problem with a practical and composite approach for Chinese digital libraries. The proposed approach consists of the glyph expression model, the glyph structure database, and supporting tools. With this approach, the following problems can be resolved. First, the extensibility of Chinese characters can be preserved. Second, it would be as easy to generate, input, display, and search unencoded characters as existing ones. Third, it is compatible with existing encoding schemes that most computers use.This approach has been utilized by organizations and projects in various application domains including archeology, linguistics, ancient texts, calligraphy and paintings, and stone and bronze rubbings. For example, in Academia Sinica, a very large full-text database of ancient texts called Scripta Sinica has been created using this approach. The Union Catalog of National Digital Archives Project (NDAP) dealt with the unencoded characters encountered when merging the metadata of 12 different thematic domains from various organizations. Also, in Bronze Inscriptions Research Team (BIRT) of Academia Sinica, 3,459 Bronze Inscriptions were added, which is very helpful to the education and research in historic linguistics.