When you see these kind of errors:

>  Revista de Música Latinoamericana    [weird characters instead of  
> diacritics]

if you can look at the data in a web browser it can be used as a tool to  
help you identify the correct encoding. Web browsers usually render  
character sets based on whatever appears in this line in the HTML source:

meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"

but most browsers allow you to force a different character encoding, so if  
something is rendering incorrectly you can use browser display options to  
try to find the correct set. It would be under something like View >  
Encoding > (whatever). I find Opera to be great for this because I was  
able to add a handy button to quickly cycle through the most common  
encodings. Of course, web browsers in general might not grok MARC-8, but  
you get the idea.


Brian Stamper
The Ohio State University Libraries
Scholarly Resources Integration
610 Ackerman Road Rm. 5833
Columbus, OH 43202-4500