I could be mistaken (never having had the pleasure of reading it), but
isn't ISO-2709 specified as a fixed number of characters, and any
conflation of characters and 8-bit bytes is on the part of users and
implementations?

I think ISO 2709 might not know from bytes, only characters. 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of
> Doran, Michael D
> Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 10:05 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] more on MARC char encoding: Now we're about
> ISO_2709 and MARC21
> 
> Hi Tod,
> 
> I'm not understanding how UTF-8 would be considered 8-bit character
> data (other than the ASCII-range of the Unicode repertoire, natch).  I
> don't think ISO 2709 knows from characters, only bytes.
> 
> -- Michael
> 
> # Michael Doran, Systems Librarian
> # University of Texas at Arlington
> # 817-272-5326 office
> # 817-688-1926 mobile
> # [log in to unmask]
> # http://rocky.uta.edu/doran/
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
> Of
> > Tod Olson
> > Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 5:04 AM
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] more on MARC char encoding: Now we're about
> > ISO_2709 and MARC21
> >
> > It has to mean UTF-8. ISO 2709 is very byte-oriented, from the
> directory
> > structure to the byte-offsets in the fixed fields. The values in
> these
> > places all assume 8-bit character data, it's completely baked in to
> the
> > file format.
> >
> > -Tod
> >
> > On Apr 17, 2012, at 6:55 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> >
> > > Okay, forget XML for a moment, let's just look at marc 'binary'.
> > >
> > > First, for Anglophone-centric MARC21.
> > >
> > > The LC docs don't actually say quite what I thought about leader
> byte
> > 09, used to advertise encoding:
> > >
> > >
> > > a - UCS/Unicode
> > > Character coding in the record makes use of characters from the
> > Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) (ISO 10646), or Unicode(tm), an
> industry
> > subset.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > That doesn't say UTF-8. It says UCS or "Unicode". What does that
> > actually mean?  Does it mean UTF-8, or does it mean UTF-16 (closer
to
> > what used to be called "UCS" I think?).  Whatever it actually means,
> do
> > people violate it in the wild?
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Now we get to non-Anglophone centric marc. I think all of which is
> > ISO_2709?  A standard which of course is not open access, so I can't
> get
> > it to see what it says.
> > >
> > > But leader 09 being used for encoding -- is that Marc21 specific,
> or is
> > it true of any ISO-2709?  Marc8 and "unicode" being the only valid
> > encodings can't be true of any ISO-2709, right?
> > >
> > > Is there a generic ISO-2709 way to deal with this, or not so much?