Foreword: The meaning of MARC

In recent years the cost of academic libraries has been increasing more rapidly than other costs of education. Because many functions performed in the operation of libraries are highly repetitive and/or clerical in nature the electronic computer has been an obvious candidate for the task of controlling the inflationary conditions. Many of the attempts to apply the computer to library problems did not recognize the size nor complexity of these problems and consequently failed or bogged down badly. One undertaking which has achieved significant results is the MARC development which began with a pilot project involving the Library of Congress and sixteen other libraries and evolved to a weekly service by LC to more than sixty subscribers to the MARC tapes.published or submitted for publicatio