[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen and Zotero - encoding problems

[Dan Scott]

On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 8:07 AM, Linda Jansova <skolkova at chello.cz> wrote:

>  Hi,
>
> Our colleagues in Jabok Library would like to promote the usage of their
> Evergreen OPAC as Zotero source data so that their patrons (and others of
> course) would be able to import individual bibliographic records to Zotero
> reference management system (https://www.zotero.org/).
>
> When used as a Mozilla Firefox plugin, it is clear that the data are
> imported via unAPI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnAPI; unfortunately the
> homepage at http://unapi.info/  does not seem to be working; a bit of
> unAPI documentation is available at
> http://code4lib.org/files/unapi_revision_1-14.html, though maybe it is
> not the latest version).
>
> Everything seems to work fine with one exception and these are records
> with non-ASCII characters such as letters with diacritics ("č" for
> example). As Czech language uses plenty of these, this issue virtually
> prevents us from using Evergreen as Zotero data source.
>
> However, I have had a look at other Evergreen catalogs (including the one
> from Laurentian University) and it seems to me that the problem is also
> present there, e.g.
> https://laurentian.concat.ca/eg/opac/record/104728?query=francais;qtype=keyword;locg=105;detail_record_view=1
> (Le francais renouvelé - the "é" character is wrongly interpreted as could
> be seen at the attached picture).
>
> Both in Jabok library catalog and in the catalog at Laurentian I have
> encountered the same problem when trying to print sample records with these
> say "special" characters, e.g.
> https://laurentian.concat.ca/eg/opac/record/print/104728?query=francais;qtype=keyword;locg=105;detail_record_view=1
>
> Firefox seems to interpret the character encoding as Unicode when viewing
> the usual (not the print) version of the bib record but when one hits the
> "Print" button and then - when the print version is displayed - checks the
> encoding, Firefox interprets it as Western. Koha users have also been
> trying to sort out a similar issue (
> https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/39395/koha-translator-encoding-problem/)
> - in their case the solution seems to be to modify opac-export.pl to
> export as UTF8.
>
> Any ideas how to fix the issue in Evergreen? (Jabok uses Evergreen 2.6.4.)
>
> Thank you in advance for sharing any hints!
>

Hi, that's an interesting problem. Zotero uses Evergreen's MODS output, and
it seems that the problem crept into the conversions that use specific MODS
versions; compare

https://laurentian.concat.ca/opac/extras/supercat/retrieve/mods/record/28391

to

https://laurentian.concat.ca/opac/extras/supercat/retrieve/mods3/record/28391

and you'll see that the first one works as expected, while the second one
is corrupted.

This is an issue for us too, as you can imagine (we're a bilingual
institution with an extensive French collection), so I'll be digging into
this.  I recently fixed a similar problem with our Z39.50 server output, so
hopefully it won't take too long.
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