[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Arabic in Evergreen

[Dan Scott]

On Thu, Mar 03, 2011 at 09:47:10AM -0500, Dan Scott wrote:
> I grabbed the same record directly from the Library of Congress to
> ensure that we were working with the raw source, not suffering from an
> import problem in Evergreen, and... oh dear. It looks like that
> catalog record is... bad. Ux200F is a marker for right-to-left text,
> and I'm surprised to see the XML entity version mixed directly into
> the MARC fields. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the desperate
> choice that a committee made somewhere in the Western world to try and
> support RTL text in a MARC8 encoded record, but if that's the case,
> it's not good. We'll have to do some more research to see what the
> standard actually says.

Thankfully, the standard is sane; see:
http://www.loc.gov/marc/specifications/speccharmarc8.html#directionality

So this is just a bad test record. Hopefully there are some good records
in LoC that we can use as a reasonable set of test cases for this part
of the effort!