Central Institute of Indian Lanugage, Manasagangotri, Mysore 570 006, E-mail: Chetana_madhu@yahoo.com; Sumabegur@gmail.com
Based on a paper to the National Seminar on Information/Knowledge Organization in the Humanities, 9 –11 August 2005, Bangalore
Information retrieval in Indian languages is a crucial issue. The library of the Central Institute of Indian Languages handles materials in several languages and scripts. In the traditional card catalogue, in order to maintain uniformity, the bibliographical details were rendered in Roman script. In automating the library catalogue and other housekeeping activities of the library a challenging factor was to select a suitable software that would work with all Indian languages and scripts. This paper presents an overview of the key issues in information retrieval in Indian languages and guidelines to retrieve the needed information in any Indian language based on the experience at CIIL Library in using VIRTUA – a library automation software package, with UNICODE support.
