Pressroom

Fresh Meadows, NY: Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL) a firm that has come to stand for excellence during 30 years of business, is using an encyclopedia tagging structure for Brill Publishers as it converts 13,000 pages of the Encyclopaedia of Islam into XML.

Brill's Maurits van den Boogert (Acquisitions Editor), said: "The second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam (EI2) was digitized more than 10 years ago, when it was still immensely innovative to do such a thing. But EI2 is a complex text, with many diacritics and other special signs (for words from Arabic, Persian, Turkish and other languages of the Islamic world), which have to be presented correctly online. In many cases this went wrong originally, resulting in countless errors and orthographic oddities. Such imperfections were accepted, however, because the net result (having the whole encyclopedia online, full-text searchable, with links) was much more user friendly than the print. Later, ad hoc improvements were made, but we remained unhappy."

Mr. van den Boogert continued: "In the meantime, we have started the third edition, which is meticulously copy edited. Then we asked DCL to key both the French version of EI2 and the first edition (EI1), with spectacular results. All of a sudden our flagship, EI2, had become the ugly duckling, so to speak, of our Islam encyclopedias online. By rekeying EI2, DCL is restoring a masterpiece; all the varnish of previous generations and all earlier touch-ups are removed from the canvas, so to speak."

Difficulties lie in capturing transliterated Arabic characters; a special template had to be created to handle them. DCL is also identifying Islamic phrases and names, based on rules set up with the client, for later indexing.

Mark Gross, President and CEO of DCL, said: "Brill is a faithful and valuable client. While I knew our project teams had become highly skilled at tagging encyclopedic sets and preparing them for indexing, it's a great compliment to be compared to restorers of art masterpieces!"

Unlimited Priorities Corporation® was the sales agent for DCL.