Diacritics and special characters

["Lorena Boylan" <boylan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The recent posting about problems with diacritics display prompts me to ask the list if other libraries have addressed this issue with Innovative staff.  My library is a new III customer; our Web OPAC was installed in April, and we had GUICat training in May.  We have a significant collection of foreign language material, not only in Western European languages, but also in non-roman languages like Russian and Chinese. The cataloging records for non-roman language materials are of course romanized according to LC and OCLC practice.  After uploading some new cataloging from OCLC, I noticed that the diacritics and special characters for non-roman languages were displaying in GUICat as codes in curly brackets, and not displaying at all in the Web OPAC.  Diacritics for Western European languages like French and German display just fine in both GUICat and the Web OPAC.

I presented this problem to our implementation team several weeks ago, but I've had no response.  I confess to being somewhat flabbergasted that Innovative hasn't dealt with issue before, which is the impression I got from our implementation folks.  Maybe I'm being picky, but if I spend the time to correctly catalog a Russian language book, I'd like my efforts to show up in the opac.  Besides, all those curly brackets in the GUICat record make it extremely difficult to read.  And I can't believe that III can't do something that OCLC has been doing for decades.

I'd be interested in hearing if other III users consider this lack of proper diacritic display a problem, and what if any discussions with III staff you may have had on the issue.

Thank you for your input.



Lorena A. Boylan
Catalog Librarian
The Academy of Natural Sciences
1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Philadelphia, PA  19103
215-299-1145    FAX:  215-299-1144
boylan@xxxxxxxxxx