I’ve been working on the North Park Archon project for the past few weeks and noticed a troubling trend. When I tried to upload the box/folder lists for our finding aids through the CSV import process, the system would reject all the special characters. Not outright reject them – just truncate the field before the character and move on to the next metadata sub-field.
Obviously, this was annoying and unfortunate – especially because I didn’t catch it until I had imported all the data.
It turns out that the problem was in the encoding language of the CSV document. For some reason, my default was set as ANSI; switching it to UTF made the difference and Archon’s scripts were able to import the special characters in the collection content field.