Unique, universal & uniform character encoding

The term "Unicode" was first introduced in 1987 by Joe Becker of Xerox, based on the phrase "unique, universal and uniform character encoding". Unicode is a standard for the representation of multilingual character sets using a 16-bit code, for a total of 65,536 characters. One of Unicode's advantages is that each code represents a distinct character, so no shifting or announcement mechanism is required to indicate diacritics and other forms of standard characters. From the beginning, librarians and information specialists played an important role in defining Unicode, particularly in ensuring that bibliographic standards and requirements were incorporated.