Use of the Universal Coded Character Set (UCS or ISO/IEC 10646) was approved in 1998 as a second encoding for MARC 21 records.  To facilitate the movement of records between MARC-8 and Unicode environments, it was recommended for an initial period that the use of Unicode be restricted to a repertoire identical in extent to the MARC-8 repertoire.  In 2007, however, such a restriction is no longer appropriate.  The full UCS repertoire, as currently defined at the Unicode web site, is valid for encoding MARC 21 records, subject only to the constraints described below:

The Unicode Consortium web site is the most complete and authoritative resource to supplement the information on Unicode given in this document.  Correspondences between the MARC-8 and Unicode encodings can be found in Part 5: Code Tables.  Some of the complexities of conversion between MARC-8 and Unicode will be discussed in Part 4: Conversion Between Environments.

NOTE:  Only one encoding scheme may be used in a MARC 21 record:  MARC-8 or Unicode.

To return, select:

Part 3:  Unicode Encoding Environment

Character Sets and Encoding Options