Koha Question of the Week: How Do I Prevent Z39.50 records from Coming in with Bad Diacritics?

by Hebah Amin-Headley on Apr 21, 2023

Each Friday, we will bring you a new Koha Question of the Week. We will select real questions that we receive and share the answers with you!

Question: How Do I Prevent Z39.50 records from Coming in with Bad Diacritics?

Answer: As explained in How to Prevent Diacritics from Happening in Koha, diacritics pop up in Koha when a record encoded in one format is brought into Koha with a different encoding.

Fortunately, in a Z39.50 search, you can preview the MARC record to know that an encoding mismatch has occurred, like this example Pokémon graphic novel:

Take note of which Z39.50 target this record came from.

Under Koha Administration -> Additional Parameters, select Z39.50/SRU servers. You should now have a list of your current Z39.50 targets. Find the target you noticed had records with bad diacritics, and under the action menu on the furthest right column of the results, navigate into Edit. Halfway down the list of configurations is Encoding.

Most targets' encoding will be either utf-8 or MARC-8; if the target was encoded with utf-8 when you spotted the bad diacritics, switch it to MARC-8 and save, or change to utf-8 if it was in MARC-8 when you spotted the bad characters.

Navigate back to your Z39.50 search and look for the same record. The bad diacritics should be displaying and importing correctly now.