Pressroom

Fresh Meadows, NY — October 15, 2009:  Data Conversion Laboratory, Inc. (DCL), providing conversion services and software to publishers, information aggregators, industry, government, libraries and documentation developers, has completed the conversion of Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur by Carl Brockelmann for Brill Publishers of Leiden, The Netherlands.

Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur is a bio–bibliographic summary of all Arabic literature in German until 1902, with about 25% of the text being transliterated names and titles of Arabic works. The work consists of five volumes containing some 4,000 pages and 1,000 pages of indexing, and is structured by subject and author. For each author both biographic and bibliographic information is provided.

DCL converted the complete dataset consisting of German and transliterated Arabic, all using Latin characters, to XML in accordance with Brill’s proprietary DTD. The editing was accomplished utilizing SC UniPad; parsing was done using the NSGMLS parser. The project was completed and delivered over a three–month period.

DCL encountered a major difficulty in that some characters could not be represented by one symbol, but required two. This necessitated the creation of a character map so that the integrity of these characters could be maintained as they were used in further conversion work.

Mr. F. Havekes, Brill’s Manager of Publishing Technology, discussed the project: “Brill Publishing was looking for a data input company that could handle about the most complicated bio–bibliographical text imaginable. The Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur contains every imaginable accentuated character and a non–intuitive and changing inner structure.  DCL input the work to a quality that was up to Brill’s very high standards, and did so with a continual interaction to resolve the multiple newly–discovered exceptions in a way that kept the input on schedule and within budget.”

Mark Gross, DCL President and CEO, responded, “This was not an easy project. There were times when we had to convert unusual markings and language transliterations understandable to only a small group of experts. However, by adhering exactly to the carefully designed DTD we were able to complete this challenging conversion successfully and on time.”