LC MARC Bibliographic Cataloging Records
The LC MARC record system, developed by the U. S. Library of Congress in the 1960's, was a major milestone in the developing information revolution. By providing a centralized cataloging system for most of the books and other media that have been printed and putting it on a computer, this innovation increased by orders of magnitude our access to information. Our knowledge of all that had been published on a subject could be recorded, added to, modified, duplicated and distributed to libraries around the world. The only thing lacking was contextual linking, and meaningful progress would be made in this area in the next twenty years. Beginning with this early foundation, interfaces and search engines would later be developed to provide easier access to a much more diverse group of users. One of the problems with bibliographic records is that there are so many distinct types of information about a book, audio tape, CD-ROM, video, or any other item in a library's holdings that a "One size fits all" approach to cataloging does not work. A close look at a few dozen cards in a library card catalog will show that there are AUTHOR, TITLE, PUBLISHER, COPYRIGHT, and many other types of information recorded there. For special or odd sized media, the number of classifications mushrooms into the thousands and more are continually being added. The "traditional" way of organizing and storing information in a computer is with a flat field or relational database. If this were tried with bibliographic records, either a great deal of information about many holdings would be lost, or the database would become so unwieldly that it would bring the fastest computer to a grinding halt. The LC MARC system defined a database using field tags so that an unlimited number of fields could be defined and easily added at a later date. LC MARC became a standard still in use by almost all libraries in the United States. These collections of bibliographic records were kept on tape in the form of a data file, an early sequential form of electronic database. Massive numbers of LC Marc records are kept at major libraries today. Subsets based on an individual library's holdings can be generated and sent to smaller libraries, where catalog cards can then be automatically printed from the MARC record file. The need for good quality, affordable bibliographic records led to the birth of a rather unique industry. Since hiring one or more professional librarians for each library would be prohibitively expensive, companies like the Follett Corporation started providing custom holdings catalogs to libraries. When the library sends in a small part of a catalog record such as an LC or Dewey number for each book, periodical, or media item in its holdings, the Follett Company will generate the complete MARC records and send them back on disk (or tape). The library can then use these to produce its own on-line public access or traditional card catalog for patrons who are used to looking up a book that way.
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