UNIMARC and international record exchange: an overview of recent projects and developments

Abstract

In recent years the UNIMARC format has come to be more widely used as a method of facilitating the international exchange of bibliographic data. This is due, in part, to a number of projects funded by the European Union as part of the Libraries Programme. This paper provides an overview of the state of such projects as reported to a workshop on the UNIMARC format held in Luxembourg in September 1996. Projects briefly described in this overview include: UseMARCON, CoBRA UNIMARC, CoBRA AUTHOR, ONE, CHASE, DELICAT and BIBLINK. Other initiatives related to UNIMARC by IFLA and OCLC are also described. The paper concludes with the main conclusions arising from the workshop addressing the areas of formats, authority control, character sets and electronic publications.