Hi all,

Jabok Library currently tries to become a part of the Czech Libary Gateway for Visually Impaired which uses Z39.50 protocol to access library data. However, when testing the results from Jabok Z39.50 server, we have encountered encoding problems. These have been confirmed by further tests conducted via Tellico (http://tellico-project.org/) which we use as an Evergreen-independent tool capable of serving as a Z39.50 client.

From Evergreen documentation (although pertaining to an older release; Jabok itself currently uses Evergreen 2.6.2) available from http://docs.evergreen-ils.org/2.1/html/Z3950serversupport.html it seems that the server uses marc-8 encoding for the output. But even when we have this marc-8 encoding set up when downloading records to Tellico, the records seems to come up with many incorrect characters (those which use diacritics), not to mention that when words with diacritics are used for searching, no results show up at all.

Would it be enough to change the default charsets mentioned in steps 3 to 4 at http://docs.evergreen-ils.org/2.1/html/Z3950serversupport.html to utf-8? Or are some other tweaks necessary? (I am rather afraid that the second option is closer to reality because even when marc-8 encoding is used, the results are incorrect – of course, supposing that Tellico itself is not buggy ;-).)

Maybe Dan would know more about this issue - I remember that when we were discussing Zotero encoding issues back in April, there was a note in the reply about fixing a similar problem with the Z39.50 output (please see https://www.mail-archive.com/open-ils-general@list.georgialibraries.org/msg10874.html)? (When I tried to download records from Laurentian University Library – using the host name and other data from http://staff.library.mun.ca/staff/toolbox/z3950hosts.htm -, it worked okay when encoding was set to utf-8 :-).)

Thank you in advance for any hints!

Linda

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