Paper traces the distribution history of CDS/ISIS in India in the nineties, its wide acceptance in the early period and its ill-fate in later years. In the last decade ISIS has re-emerged as an Integrated Library Management Systems (ILMS) with the launching of ABCD. Also J-ISIS has emerged as an important tool assimilating advanced language and web technologies to create textual information systems with the same ease and vigor of old CDS/ISIS. In this transformation it has become Unicode compliant and replaced database engine with Berkely DB. Inverted File indexing has been updated with Apache Lucene. Paper briefly describes ISIS Software Family, its main components and related technologies. Possibility of using vernacular scripts in textual information system can bring out opportunities for building up heritage information systems. This will result in the increasing role of ISIS software in cultural documentation. The present study reports the development of a bibliography in Malayalam using J-ISIS, for the first time in an Indian language. In this endeavor LaTeX, the renowned typesetting package is used. The symbiosis between J-ISIS and LaTeX can open new horizons in preparing bibliographies in regional languages of Afro-Asian countries, especially in projects like Indian National Bibliography.
Micro-CDS/ISIS, J-ISIS, ABCD, Cultural documentation, Heritage Information Systems, LaTeX, Typesetting Bibliographies, Textual Information Systems, Unicode, Language Technology
