ntended to
be:

"- hospitable to all kinds of library materials;

- sufficiently flexible for a variety of applications in addition to catalogue
production; and

- usable in a range of automated systems."

Over the years, however, despite cooperation efforts, several versions of MARC
emerged, e.g. UKMARC, INTERMARC and USMARC, whose paths diverged because of
different national cataloguing practices and requirements. Since the early 1970s
an extended family of more than 20 MARC formats has evolved. Differences in data
content means that editing is required before records can be exchanged.

One solution to the problem of incompatibility was to create an international
MARC format (UNIMARC) which would accept records created in any MARC format.
Records in one MARC format could be converted into UNIMARC and then be converted
into another MARC format, so that each national agency would need to write only
two programs - one to convert into UNIMARC and one to convert from UNIMARC -
instead of one program for each other MARC format, (e.g. INTERMARC to UKMARC,
USMARC to UKMARC etc.).

In 1977 the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutes
(IFLA) published UNIMARC: Universal MARC format, followed by a second edition in
1980 and a UNIMARC Handbook in 1983, all focussed primarily on the cataloguing
of monographs and serials, and taking advantage of international progress
towards the standardization of bibliographic information reflected in the ISBDs
(international standard bibliographic descriptions). In the mid-1980s it was
considered necessary to expand UNIMARC to cover documents other than monographs
and serials, so a new description of the format - the UNIMARC Manual -was
produced in 1987. By this time UNIMARC had been adopted by several bibliographic
agencies as their in-house format. But developments did not stop there.
Increasingly, a new kind of format - an authorities format - was being used. As
described in the website:

"Previously agencies had entered an author's name into the bibliographic format
as many times as there were documents associated with him or her. With the new
system they created a single authoritative form of the name (with references) in
the authorities file; the record control number for this name was the only item
included in the bibliographic file. The user would still see the name in the
bibliographic record, however, as the computer could import it from the
authorities fil