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On 4/18/2012 6:04 AM, Tod Olson wrote: > 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. I'm not sure that follows. One could certainly have UTF-16 in a Marc record, and still count bytes to get a directory structure and byte offsets. (In some ways it'd be easier since every char would be two bytes). 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. But if in fact records in the wild with the 'u' value are far more likely to be UTF-8... well it's certainly not the first time the MARC21 standard was useless/ignored as a standard in answering such questions.