ABSTRACT
The Unicode Standard is the single, universal character standard for all text, covering all of the world’s writing systems, modern and ancient, as well as other elements of text such as technical symbols. Unicode provides the basis for the processing, storage, and interchange of textual data worldwide; it is fundamental to modern software and information technology protocols, and provides the character infrastructure of the World Wide Web. Unicode underlies modern systems and software products for libraries. Use of Unicode is explicitly included in the specifications for MARC 21 and UNIMARC records, and Z39.50 information retrieval, and is implicit in library standards and protocols based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) or Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
