We have had a few other libraries ask about the Russian ligatures since there seems to be several inconsistencies with how these diacritics are coded in LC’s authority records.\u00a0 A couple of months ago, one of our programmers was looking into this issue.\u00a0 Here is the information that he found:<\/p>\n
The reason why both the single ligature and the two half ligature’s are used is the LC records are inconstant in which ligature diacritics they use. We aren’t randomly changing them, we are exporting what’s in the LC record. I’ve only looked at a few records but this usually happens when OCLC updates a record. I’m pretty sure OCLC uses the two separate left and right half ligatures and LC uses the single combining ligature.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/em><\/p>\n Here’s a direct quote from LC’s mapping table:<\/em><\/p>\n Code: <\/em><\/strong>The Ligature that spans two characters is constructed of two halves in MARC-8: EB (Ligature, first half) and EC (Ligature, second half).\u00a0 The preferred Unicode\/UTF-8 mapping is to the single character Ligature that spans two characters, U+0361.\u00a0 The single character Ligature is encoded between the two characters to be spanned. <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n