THE METAMORPHOSIS OF MINISIS
By ROBERT CHARBONNEAU
he first version of the MINISIS bibliographic information system was
developed by IDRC in 1976. This
powerful software package, based on the
International Labour Off~ce’s ISIS software,
was designed primarily for computerizing
libraries and information centres in developing countries. But more than that, it is able
to serve its users in their own language.
MINISIS runs off the Hewlett-Packard
3000 series of minicomputers which are less
expensive than main frame computers and
thus more easily accessible to institutions in
developing countries.
MINISIS became operational in January
1978. Since then, the number of us?rs has
increased sharply, with more than 170 systems now on line in 44 countries, most of
them in the Third World.
The system’s greatest asset is its flexibility From the start, its designers wanted to develop a system that could easily be adapted
to a wide range of languages. The software
was initially designed to operate in IDRC’s
three working languages-English.
French,
and Spanish--all of which use the Roman
alphabet. It was not long, however, before
MINISIS was expanded to include Arabic
and Chinese characters as well.
sequently able to display. This provides for
information to be uniformly stored, regardless of the kind of terminal used or its particular characteristics.
Finally, the team
modified the software slightly to adjust for the
specific features of non-Roman characters.
All of these modifications made for Arabic
were easily adapted to every other language
having fewer than 256 characters, including
Thai, Korean. Russian, and Greek. These
changes have also allowed the system to be
ad3pted to Chinese. a much more complex
language.
A person must be familiar vvth some 2000
characters (or ideograms) just to read a
newspaper in Chinese. A Chinese dictionary contains over 50 000 characters. Software manufacturers
generally
include
ON THE ROAD TO TUNIS
p
T
In 1981, the Arab League’s Documentation Centre in Tunis was the’first institution
to’propose an Arabic version of MINISIS.
The display and printing hardware was already available on the market, but there was
still much work to be done to make the system operational.
The development team first had to translate the terminology used by the software to
communicate with the user, namely the 6000
or so instructions and messages that can be
displayed on the screen. Next, interfaces
were installed between the computer and the
terminals for data capture and display. These
small programs translate the Arabic characters produced bv the terminal into memorvstored codes. ihey also ensure that the
codes are in a format that the terminal is sub-
One advantage of M/N/S/S
is that it does not favour
any one character-coding
system.
16 000 of the more common characters in
their programs. This represents about 95
percent of what is normally required.
CODING AND CAPTURE
The purpose of coding is to give each
character a numerical value. There are
several systems for coding Chinese characters. Some institutions, such as the Scientific and Technical Information Centre @TIC)
in Beijing, use telegraphy code, for example, which accommodates 10 000 Chinese
characters. The advantage of MINISIS is that
it does not favour any one coding system.
Capturing Chinese characters, however,
remains a real problem. More than 250
different methods now exist. Despite its pro-
motion over the last 20 years or so. the
phonetlcs~based writing system of Pin Yin
has yet to gain general acceptance in China.
As with the coding systems. the designers of MINISIS did not wish to favour one
method of data capture over another. Terminal users can enter ideograms in any manner they choose, depending on the particular
keyboards available and techniques used.
The interfaces assure data uniformity.
MORE AND MORE USERS
Because of the flexibility of MINISIS, its
future in the People’s Republic of China is
assured. Already 11 scientific institutions in
China, including the prestigious STIC of the
Ministry of Machine-Building
Industry in
Beijing, are now using the software system.
The National University of Singapore, which
also uses MINISIS, hopes to take advantage
of “its linguistic capabilities”. The Toronto
Metropolitan Library wants to make use of
the system’s great versatility to manage its
multilingual collection.
At STIC there is optimism about the future.
All systems are now fully operational and
training has been completed. What remains
now is the formidable task of computerlzing
the Centre’s library. Some 10 000 titles have
already been entered. By next year, STIC will
be the fourth largest computerized data base
in the country. And this isonly the beginning!
Chinese researchers now have a fast and
reliable tool for retrieving scientific and techn~cal information produced by their colleagues. The large number of contacts
between Chinese scientists and today’s
global sharing of knowledge demanded
such a development.
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