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
