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Peter:
What are Marcive tapes: the short answer I think is, they are batches of
MARC records culled from the predominant library catalog utility, OCLC, by
a for-profit company (Marcive), and sold to libraries who find an
advantage in paying some pennies per record rather than copying/creating
the records themselves.  Marcive sells GPO records to libraries based on
each buying library's federal depository profile; meaning that Marcive
will sell to a library records for each U.S. gov't. produced item it
receives, and only what it receives, ideally.
 
Stanford Libraries bought Marcive tapes for its GPO holdings last year.
We decided not to load individual sheet records for the USGS 7.5 series,
for instance, because user questions here don't involve sheet names for
this series, and because of the incompleteness of this series' catalog
record coverage.  For smaller scale topographic series and all the USGS
geoscience series though, individual records from Marcive have been loaded
by tapes into our catalog.
 
Marcive was selected over batch tape loads from other vendors (including
GPO themselves) because Marcive people go through the records, allegedly,
and "doctor" them to make all item records more uniform.
 
JK Herro
Branner Earth Sciences Library and Map Collection
Stanford, CA  94305