Comments inline. On Mon, March 12, 2007 4:26 am, Dorian Meid wrote:
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In this example I used the host "z3950.gbv.de" port "20012" database "gvk" user "999" password "abc". I searched for the ISBN "3-552-06027-8" The title should be "Die Süße des Lebens"
I have tested and found that the problem is with GBV at least for this record. I had never tested their records retuned in UTF-8 from port 20012 previously. I only tested for the record you provided just now but found that all their other encodings served over various ports seem to be correct for this record. In my extensive previous testing of GBV I had only tested the MARC-8 encodings returned from port 20011. I had occasionally seen problems of encoding with individual records which had not been correctly encoded in MARC-8 but that may be unavoidable from any large data source, especially union catalogues like GBV. Koha does not yet have support for the other encodings they provide. I tested with my own client, not yet ported to Koha, which supports all the encodings I have found in use anywhere except for UNIMARC records from Greece. When different encodings are available as options from a particular target catalogue I have found that using the encoding most likely to have used in the original records is probably safest. In the case of GBV, that would be ISO 5426. Koha has no support for ISO 5426 yet unless it was added when I was not looking. Your best option for use with Koha is to use the MARC-8 encodings from port 20011. Not enough systems use UTF-8 records, therefore, UTF-8 services are often not well tested at many libraries. Even the Library of Congress, when returning records in UTF-8 will frequently have improper encodings so that MARC-8 is also the best option there. Please report this problem to GBV if you have any good contacts there.
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Thomas Dukleth Agogme 109 E 9th Street, 3D New York, NY 10003 USA http://www.agogme.com 212-674-3783