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    Determine the character set of a MARC record

    • Product: Voyager
    • Relevant for Installation Type: Multi-Tenant Direct, Dedicated-Direct, Local, TotalCare

     

    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:

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    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
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