Chinese libraries on the Web

[Ernest Perez]

In mid-October, I will be going for six weeks to the Fujian Provincial
Library in Fuzhou, China. This is on a staff exchange agreement.  Among
other things, I will serve as a resource for that library and regional
professionals in the area of developing their Internet/WWW activities.

I'm preparing for the trip, and have two questions I would like to pose
to the list, since I'm not that knowledgeable about non-Western/Roman
library automation apps.

  1) Chinese libraries of course primarily use the Chinese character
set.   They can get some nice beginner-type freeware, shareware and
inexpensive database apps and tools, which is of the ASCII persuasion
and does not support the extended character set. Examples include the
UNESCO CDS/ISIS freeware opac; the old DOS InMagic Plus, Filemaker Pro,
etc.
  Is there any add-on software which will cause these
ideographically-challeged programs to correctly handle the Chinese
character set?  I don't mean just display the characters, but hopefully
allow effective retrieval & data entry operations, database management,
etc.

  2) FMOI (For My Own Information) Are there search engines that serve
or specialize in the Chinese and East Asian Web sites? Or are there
special tricks to use in the standard ones, that will accomplish the
same effect. (I'm going to go off right now & read the Alta Vista
Advanced Search doc file)

I think the whole list might benefit from this kind of information. But
if respondents think it's a bit esoteric, respond directly to me, and I
will summarize for the list.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Cheers,
-ernest

.______                         |
|  ____|\                       |
| |\__  \|rnest Perez, Ph.D.    | Good judgment comes from experience.
|  ___|\ Oregon State Library   | Experience comes from bad judgment.
| |\___\| perez at opac.state.or.us|
|______|\ 503-378-4243, xt 257  |
 \______|                       |