On Thursday, January 22, 2009 10:28 AM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
>Does anybody here know the difference between MARC21 and USMARC?

For your purposes, MARC21 and USMARC are the same. USMARC became MARC 21 through evolution, but structurally, they are the same. The only differences are in field/subfield definitions. I believe this also the case for UNIMARC (though in that case, the field definitions are much different)--I think Koha uses MARC::File::USMARC for manipulating both MARC 21 and UNIMARC flavors.

>(Alternatively, maybe instead I need to turn strict and warning on and filter out any bad records. Hmmm... )

That would be recommended. I've have a .pl, rawanddecodedscan [1], that reads a file of raw MARC and reports structurally problematic records (as .txt and .mrc files). MARC::Lint (from CPAN) (and Lintadditions (from my site, though my ISP has changed the way it deals with directories)) might be useful for finding problems in structurally-sound MARC files.

[1] <http://home.inwave.com/eija/fullrecscripts/rawanddecodedscan.txt>, uses MARC::BBMARC, which is part of MARC::Errorchecks (from CPAN).

I hope this helps,

Bryan Baldus
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