From a good article on this at http://www.indexdata.com/blog/2009/10/z3950-dummies-part-4. $ yaz-marcdump -f marc-8 -t utf-8 -o marc -l 9=97 part01.dat > part.mrc (97 = 'a') If I remember correctly some of this functionality has also changed over various versions so not sure if this is still needed, but better safe than sorry. Might also want to check the man page with your particular version of yaz-marcdump. Jon G. On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 9:39 AM, Eric Lease Morgan <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Does the -t flag in yaz-marcdump tell the program to convert characters in MARC records to specific character sets, or does merely change the value in a MARC leader to denote the character set of the record as a whole? In other words, will yaz-marcdump do its best to convert MARC-8 characters found in MARC records into a UTF-8 characters? > > -- > Eric Morgan > University of Notre Dame >