MARC-8

The MARC-8 charset is a MARC standard used in MARC-21 library records. The MARC formats are standards for the representation and communication of bibliographic and related information in machine-readable form, and they are frequently used in library computer systems. The encoding now known as MARC-8 was introduced in 1968 with the beginning of the use of the MARC format. Over the years it has grown to include code points for a large repertoire of characters including Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek scripts and over 15,000 characters used in writing Chinese, Japanese and Korean. If a character is not representable in MARC-8 of a MARC-21 record, then UTF-8 must be used instead. UTF-8 has support for many more characters than MARC-8. MARC-8 is rarely used outside library records.

Technical details

MARC-8 uses a variant of the ISO-2022 encoding. It uses escape characters to represent characters beyond the 7-bit ASCII range of characters.

It generally uses the same logical BiDi ordering as Unicode.