[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Marcedit

[Dan Scott]

On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 11:16 AM,  <Gislaine.Hamelin at statcan.gc.ca> wrote:
> Hello list,
>
> Is anyone using Marcedit with Evergreen and French language records?
> Currently we are on Symphony, but, will be changing to Evergreen this Fall.
> With this database when we import the accents are changed to symbols, so we
> cannot use Marcedit. I wonder whether this will be an issue with Evergreen?

I have occasionally used Marcedit with Evergreen; it is like any other
MARC editor with respect to encoding - if you are generating
UTF8-encoded MARC records, and have set the leader 09 position to 'a',
then you should be fine. Or, if you are generating MARC8-encoded MARC
records, and have set the leader 09 position to ' ', then you should
be fine. If you mix the two up, then you will not be fine :)

Also, a heads-up with Evergreen - ensure that your system is running a
recent version of MARC::Record and MARC::File::XML. We were running
the packaged version of MARC::File::XML (0.88) on our Debian Lenny
system, and it happily converted the encoding of characters from MARC8
to UTF8 - but due to a bug in that version of the Perl module, it did
not set the leader correctly. In Evergreen 2.0, having the leader set
correctly becomes very important! Luckily we were able to upgrade to
MARC::File::XML 0.93 via CPAN without problem and ran some global
updates on our the MARC records that existed in the database prior to
our upgrade to correct the problems (symptoms included imported MARC
records having accents converted into garbage symbols, or the
inability to save edited records).