RE: MARC Records, XML, and encoding

> From: Joshua Ferraro [mailto:[email protected]] 
> Sent: 19 May, 2006 13:40
> To: Edward Summers
> Cc: perl4lib
> Subject: Re: MARC Records, XML, and encoding
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Here is an OCLC record:
> 
> http://liblime.com/public/oclc1.dat
> 
> So ... any suggestions for tracking down this problem? ... 
> and what about ideas for handling these records 'in the wild' 
> that have some encoding problems... what do other MARC libraries do?

I was curious about whether this record was bad in WorldCat and since
I have access to WorldCat, I looked at the record.  There appears to
be one diacritic in this record, a MARC-8 E2, combining acute, which
has "e" as its base character.  I exported the record from WorldCat
and it does in fact have an E2 in it.

However, the size of the record, above, and the one I exported from
OCLC Connexion are different.  Above, 1442 bytes vs. OCLC 1387.  The
005's are, above 20060516100102.0 vs. OCLC 20060519162028.0.  So it's
not surprising that the sizes are different.

When I use MarcView on both records it doesn't complain and looking
at both records side-by-side it appears that there are very minor
edits.  I suspect that the record was edited on OCLC, then exported,
where as I just exported the record without making any edits.

This doesn't solve your issue, but I don't think the issue is with
the actual content of the record.


Andy.

Andrew Houghton, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
http://www.oclc.org/about/
http://www.oclc.org/research/staff/houghton.htm