Determine the character set of a MARC record

Question

How to determine the character set (encoding scheme) of a MARC 21 bibliographic, authority or holdings record.

Answer

You may determine the character set of a record from byte 9 of the bibliographic, authority or holdings record Leader.

The value of “a” indicates the record is Unicode (e.g., UTF-8) -- an industry subset of the Universal Coded Character Set (UCS); a blank indicates a non-Unicode 8-bit character set (e.g., MARC-8).

Example of UTF-8 in byte 9 of the Voyager Cataloging Client record:

Additional Information

Only one encoding scheme may be used in a MARC 21 record: MARC-8 or Unicode.

For more information see: https://www.loc.gov/marc/specifications/speccharintro.html

PRO TIP: Use a tool like MarcEdit to examine the import file in human-readable ".mrk" format.

• Article last edited: 08-Jul-2020