Hi Michael, Thanks for your reply.
> I believe that MARC::Charset only does MARC-8 to UTF-8 conversion and vice > versa, so won't be a solution for automating your Latin-1 to MARC-8 > conversion, unless you were planning to do Latin-1=>UTF-8=>MARC-8. Right, that was my plan. Since latin-1 to UTF-8 isn't difficult to do (using utf8::encode()), I figured that would be the simplest solution. Or am I wrong? > A few years ago, I wrote an imperfect MARC-8 to Latin-1 character set > conversion routine [1]. If you can't find any off-the-shelf solution, it > may serve as a basis for writing a Latin-1 to MARC-8 conversion routine. > Because MARC-8 is only really used in "library land" and is somewhat > complex, I found few available open-source conversion routines (this was > before Ed Summers wrote MARC::Charset), which is why I wrote my own. Yeah, that has been my experience as well--MARC::Charset is the only thing that I've been able to find that would even help in addressing the issue. However, I'm assuming that I'm not the only person that has ever needed to do some conversion between Latin-1 and MARC-8 in order to get valid MARC records, so I thought that maybe people had some other ways of doing it. > > During the test install, it says it requires the module DB_File, > > and during the test install of that, it fails > > I believe that Berkeley DB is a prerequisite. It is--I'm not sure what's involved in installing Berkeley DB, but our admin has told me that she's got the dependencies for MARC::Charset listed on her white-board and is trying to work through them, and she's running into problems. > -- Michael Doran > > [1] MARC to Latin: A charset conversion routine in Perl > http://rocky.uta.edu/doran/charset/ Thanks for this--I'll look into it and see what I can work out. Jason Thomale
