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MARCIVE tapes are so called because the firm that sells
them is called MARCIVE - it's a shoving together of MARC
(Library of Congress' MAchine Readable Cataloging format,
which is used by very nearly every library in the US -
and as UNIMARC, overseas - as a cataloging format) and
archive (I suspect).  MARCIVE purchased the mag tapes of
cataloging records that the US Govt Printing Office
cataloging staff have been inputting on MARC since about
1976 (if I remember correctly, the first issue of the
Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government Publications which
reflected that is July 1976) to present, cleaned them
up, and has busily been selling them to libraries in the
US who have: a. online catalog; b. U.S. depository
program; and c. a need to have access to all those documents
without having to do the cataloging themselves.  MARCIVE
will match the "profile" (the items which the depository
library selects) against the database and ship only the
records for what the library has.  Having the MARCIV
tapes loaded on one's online catalog causes a substantial
increase in the use of U.S. documents.  There is one little
catch - the GPO catalogers create a record for every item,
e.g., for every USGS topographic sheet.
Mary L. Larsgaard, UCSB Map & Imagery Lab