This paper emphatically explores the urgent demands for the multilingual processing of the Chinese character in documentation, the present situation of the character sets of oriental languages, and the necessity and importance of the formulation of the international universal character set(ISO 10646)──unicode including Chinese character, Japanese character and Korean character. This new international standard will make a real integrated multilingual information processing system come true.

The hand─written character recognition indicates the automatic recognition of hand─written characters, numbers .letters and symbols by computer, which has a great potential use in office automation, information processing, and library and information community. The paper depicts the development and practice of hand ─written character recognition in China, while advising its practical target in the library automation in 1990' s.

The paper introduces the automatic indexing system of the Chinese sci - tec document──CADAIS which was programmed in ISIS pascal and has been added to CDS ISIS V2. 3. The system structure and functions, principles for automatic indexing of Chinese documents, dictionary composition and construction, indexing algorithm as well as the experimental results are also described in detail.

The background analysis and concept evaluation for the establishment of the distributed AISS (Astronautics Information Service System)are presented on the basis of the comparision between three kinds of information retrieval systems (IRS): the centralized ,the distributed and the decentralized ones. There are five important factors being considered for the system design of distributed AISS. They are the present organization system of the astronautics information services, the network environment, the user's geographical distribution, the information capacity (size of database) and the financial support. A brief introduction to the AISSnetwork is deseribed as well.The trial experiments of the AISS have shown many excellent performances of the distributed network.

After reviewing the expert system s benefits to cataloguing and. the related research works abroad,we analyze the characteristics of title pages and copyright pages of Chinese books, the main sources of biblio- graphic data, in the light of linguistics and layout, and present the results of a feasibility study of automatic cataloguing for Chinese books. Four kinds of system models, then, are put forward according to the different requirements of various libraries. In the end, we discuss the technical matter involved in development of expert cataloguing system for Chinese books.

The article analyzes and summarizes the features and problems of the Chinese Book Cataloguing Software (CBCS) used among the university libraries which took part in the Joint Retrospective Conversion Pro- ject for the Chinese Books in recent years. Based on the practical usage of this software, the authors also give the suggestions to improve the software for future use.