Hi, I'm wondering if the script bulkmarcimport.pl is simply checking for the value of leader byte 9 if your framework is set to MARC21/USMARC records and then trusting that value. If it's blank it assumes MARC-8 encoding and converts it to UTF-8 using MARC::Charset; if ldr9 is 'a' then it assumes UTF-8 and leaves it as is. Is there something else going on here? Is this a relatively safe approach with MARC21/USMARC records as a whole? Should bulkmarcimport.pl only be used on records that are known to be only MARC-8 and/or UTF-8? I'm wondering if there aren't other non-standard character encodings for MARC21 records out there. For instance, the Wellcome library [1] says it provides records in MARC21 and then says they are in ISO-8859-1 (Latin1) character set. I can imagine there are others out there. I don't know if Latin1 would be a problem, but it seems that other character encodings might be if MARC-8 is assumed to be the character encoding when it isn't. Does the built in Z39.50 search, do character set conversion to UTF-8 as well? Thanks for any help you can provide understanding how Koha handles character encodings. --Jason [1] http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/node58.html#P24_1668