Since The European Library portal provides searching facilities from all European countries, multilingualism has become an asset. As a consequence, character sets acceptance for searching is a must. In order to do so, partners should comply to The European Library requirement and implement their collection in Unicode/UTF8.

The Unicode Standard is a character encoding system designed to support the worldwide interchange processing and display of written texts in diverse languages. This standard can be implemented by different character encodings like UTF-8. UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format) is able to represent any character in the Unicode standard. Unicode today is supported on all platforms and in many applications, including database systems and printers.

In order to make it easier to search with languages using special characters, The European Library has set up a virtual keyboard:

Since most recent browsers support Unicode, The European Library recommends that all webpages are encoded in UTF-8.

This is very simple: