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