----------------------------Original message---------------------------- 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