Multinational Community Progresses with Standards

IFLA (international Federation of Library Associations) was not historically thought of as a place for standards but in the last few years they have been actively working in both support of and development of standards and guidelines. Their latest offering is the Multilingual dictionary of cataloguing terms and concepts, which is a guide to provide the multinational community a standard set of definitions for many terms and concepts used by the library cataloguing community. Terms and definitions are available in English and a variety of other languages.

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Consortium Seeking Multilingual Web Standards

The World Wide Web Consortium is where the industry meets to set standards for the Web and Jeffery Jaffe is overseeing their largest project in progress ( HTML5 standards group), all the while trying to ensure that the Consortium sharpens its focus on multilingual web standards for countries like India.

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Standards: Straightjacket or Straight Edge?

Standards were not popular with would-be railroad tycoons in the 1880s. A standard set of railroad tracks eliminated some profitable loading and unloading work. Incompatible tracks kept the other guys’ rolling stock on another guy’s tracks. Eventually standards emerged because a couple of tycoons figured out how to make even more money by standardizing. Many industries go through this wide open approach only to find that over time certain methods or designs become part of the furniture of living.

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