Help - opacs and accent marks query

[Shelly Lochhead <s_lochhead@MENTOR.UNH.EDU>]

This is a tale - if you want the short version, cut to the last 2
paragraphs!

Since the recon (done famously by WLN - what a great outfit!) I've run
into a problem with diacritics.  More to the point, into a problem with
how the opac displays them!

Whenever a word contains an accent mark, Winnebago/Mac displays that
accent as a little open box (this is the Macintosh symbol for any
undefined character in a particular font).  Now, I could live with this
for a while, but it is screwing up all the searches.  A kid puts in a
keyword search on Quebec and comes up empty, despite our several books and
videos on the topic.  Only if said kid does the search on
Que(little-open-box)bec, do the holdings display.

So I emailed Winnebago, and told them all my troubles, and after a few
exchanges and WLN's provision of more sample records, I was connected with
a Winnebago programmer who was prepared to work on the problem as soon as
I sent examples of the most commonly-occurring problem diacritics.  Said
records to be in the original dos format.  (Me with a Mac version,
remember....)

Well, I just hadn't the time to go through, one-by-one, and choose a
representative sample.  I was also loathe to prevail on WLN to send me a
disk of just those records, in the original dos format.  So I emailed the
programmer at Winnebago last summer inquiring whether or not the Mac
version supports the ALA extended ascii character set, or planned to in
the future.  No word back, so far.  And I have put off jogging their
memories on the situation, what with the typical fall workload at my end.
But my brain is clearing, and I am ready to tackle the problem again.

And I thought that with a little information from you guys, I might make
more sense!

Now, the questions:

(1)  Do those of you with Macintosh-based opacs, whose recons were done
by a bibliographic utility like OCLC, WLN, etc., have problems with the
display of diacritics?  If not, do you know why not?  (If so, please
commisserate.)

(2)  How about those of you with Winnebago dos versions?


Hoping to learn something,

Shelley



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Shelley Lochhead, Librarian       ____/|              603-746-4167  x230
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