German Diacritics from FirstSearch Worldcat Not Importing Correctly

vincedmet · January 11, 2018

Hello,

I realize this topic was brought up a number of years ago, but I am currently experiencing problems with importing German-language records from the subscription version of WorldCat into Zotero. The diacritics do not display correctly in the Zotero record, for e.g. the umlaut on the O in "Österreichische" displays as "�sterreichische."

So far, this does not seem to be happening when I download the same records from Worldcat.org.

Is anyone else still experiencing this problem?

Thanks.

adamsmith · January 11, 2018

do you have an OCLC number for a couple of affected entries, please?

vincedmet · January 11, 2018

Sure.

Here are some OCLC numbers for records that did not import correctly from FirstSearch, but that did import correctly from worldcat.org:

OCLC: 3623061
OCLC: 879157495

Thanks.

adamsmith · January 12, 2018

so as an update, OCLC has gone back(!) to encoding their export in ISO 8859-1 after they appeared to have seen the light some time two years ago. I've asked about this on twitter and I'll see if there's any willingness to fix this, which would be much preferable. Zotero does have a way to address this, but it's a bit messy because Worldcat does, of course, have items with characters outside ISO 8859-1
https://twitter.com/adam42smith/status/951628153058942981

vincedmet · January 12, 2018

Thanks for looking into this with OCLC. You mention that "Zotero does have a way to address this..." - would you be able to expand on that point or provide instructions?

Thanks.

adamsmith · January 12, 2018

It's technical, but you can see what we used to do here: https://github.com/zotero/translators/commit/c834d847805f030afe3c38c4ad92f135faf01a4d#diff-7f828e2ed25e55965b85018de219710f

vincedmet · January 12, 2018

Okay, thanks.

rac8f · March 20, 2019

Are there any updates or workarounds to this? We are still seeing this issue.