> In fact, I worry that the standard may pre-date UTF-8, with it's 
> reference to "UCS" ---  if I understand things right, at one point
there 
> was only one unicode encoding, called "UCS", which is basically a 
> backwards-compatible subset of what became UTF-16.

> So I worry the standard really "means" UCS/UTF-16.

Now you're just trying to scare yourself.  I've never seen UTF-16
MarcXML.  I've never seen anything but UTF-8 encoded MarcXML.

Ralph