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If you're planning on dealing with spatial data from
the U.S. government, it seems likely that you'll
need to incorporate fields from the draft metadata
standard issued by the Federal GEographic Data
Committee.  Larry Carver and I have done some
work on figuring out equivalencies between MARC
fields and what's in the draft standard and
amazingly enough, those equivalencies do exist
for say, half of the draft metadata fields.
Mary Larsgaard, UCSB Map & Imagery lab