1Kerala Forest Research Institute, Trichur, Kerala, India. Email: hussain@kfri.org
Based on a paper the National Seminar on Digitization: Practical Experiences, 9 –11 August 2004, at Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science, Bangalore.
The need for developing Information Systems in Indian vernacular languages is now feltmore than ever. Use of local scripts becomes inevitable in the creation of Informationsystems for digitized palm leaves, manuscripts and local documents. M-ISIS is a localized version of CDS\ISIS for Malayalam language and script, which is programmed using ISIS32.DLL created by UNESCO. It is a bibliographic information system for Malayalam documents using Malayalam script. Together with the techniques of ‘Nitya Digital Archives’ it searches using Malayalam script and retrieves both references and full texts. A special font ‘Meera.ttf’ is designed and a rendering engine to process conjunct formation is programmed, enabling both data entry and query formulation inMalayalam. This paper describes the creation of a digital archive of ‘Mathrubhumi’ weekly. A few issues of the weekly were scanned to PDF (Portable Document Format) using Adobe Acrobat. Catalogue data of each article was entered into a CDS\ISIS database through a data entry worksheet designed in M-ISIS. The prototype shows immense possibilities of localization of CDS\ISIS in Indian languages.
