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what librarians really care about is this behind-the-scenes view or the marked bibliographic record what is a Marc record Marc stands for machine readable cataloging remember the old days when you had to go to the library and use their card catalog or perhaps you went to the library and you saw those big shells with drawers and cards in them and you wondered what they were well the marc format was created in the 1960s as a means of computerizing the information on those cards it has become the means by which library systems interpret bibliographic data in its early days there were many flavors of Marc us Marc UK Marquette cetera but these formats evolved over time into the international marked wente one standard the link here takes you to the Library of Congress website which lists out all of the details of that mark 21 format now there are different kinds of Marc records bibliographic and authority what librarians will want from you is the bibliographic Marc record here's an overview of what goes into a marketable graphic record each field is designated by a three-digit number which represents or signifies what information is represented there you'll see that this information isn't really anything new to you they want title and author information as well as other descriptive information such as Edition imprint and pagination there is also room in the marc format for the libraries to add information that is local to them so there is a little bit of flexibility this is a partial example of a Marc bibliographic for the second Harry Potter we looked at earlier you can see the three-digit field or tag number on the left each field also has two indicators which represent certain information and within fields there may also be subfields subfields are predefined for certain types of information if you look at the 300 in this example the subfield a contains pagination while subfield B illustration information and soap you'll see the height measurement of the book for the description of the book to display properly to library patrons information needs to be where the library system will expect to find it in the mark record as further examples numbers and codes in the 0xx fields are going to include such information as unique identifier in this case 0 0 1 is the unique identifier for this Marc record I should mention here that every Marc record needs to have a unique identifier to prevent Marc records from overwriting each other in a library system which can be a real mess for libraries you may choose something alphanumeric such as a local identifier for your title in your database along with a few letters of your name or some other identification scheme LC control numbers ISBNs and classification systems such as library of congress or dewey decimal are also entered here here again you can see author title and publication information as well as physical description in their appropriate mark fields the 5-xx fields include notes about this book here we see the names of the sequel to this book and what the what book it's a sequel of as well as a summary of what the book is about the 6 X X's contain related subjects and you'll see there are many here in this example and the 7 X X here or the 700 lists the illustrator of this particular publication if you're going to work with mark records you'll become familiar with dot MRC or dot MRK files it is also possible to get mark information in an XML format also known as Mark XML I believe that most library systems will accept both though the dot MRC files are going to be your most common what we won't go into detail about now is the possible future transition away from mark records you're all aware that there are different flavors of XML out there including onyx which is prevalent in the publishing community well there's real discussion going on in the library community about moving away from the clunkiness if you will of records into a library flavour of XML so there's certainly an understanding that library metadata format needs to join the 21st century having said that market information will still be around for a long time