This is not a Perl solution, but if you are just looking to convert MARC-8 records to UTF-8 record you can use Terry Reese's MarcEdit program. Under its MARC Tools section it allows you to do batch conversions.
Thanks, Andy. It has been a while since I looked at MarcEdit, and it's probably worth another look.
But, no, it's not just a question of converting records. That will be done by my client's ILS vendor. The problem really lies in converting a bunch of regular processing that takes place in batch on new and revised bib records, to do things like add equivalent thesaurus descriptors in other languages, add special search terms, edit local fields and do some very database-specific checking. All this is implemented in Perl using MARC-8 records, and the processing has to be updated to accommodate UTF-8 before the ILS can be upgraded to a new version and people can start using Unicode, not only for Western European languages, but also for languages like Thai.
Ron
