Other MARC Formats 

After the joint work of BNB and LC on the MARC format, other countries also quickly started development of their national formats. They are Canada (CANMARC), Australia (AUSMARC), Germany (MAB1), Italy (ANNAMARC), Danish (DANMARC), Spain (IBERMARC), Sweden (SWEMARC), etc. Growing enthusiasm on the part of national bibliographic agencies to develop their own MARC records resulted in the widespread use of the MARC format. But the only area of standardisation in these national formats was the record structure effected through the adoption of ISO 2709. They still showed wide variations in respect of content and content designators. Contents refers to the data elements and content designators to the tags, indicators, subfield codes, occurrence identifiers, etc., which describe or identify some attribute of a data element or group of data elements. These differences necessitated suitable programs to be written for one • agency to use the records of another. Within the LC MARC itself the variety of material added to the complexity of interchange of records. In August 1971 a recommendation was made to IFLA that they assume the responsibility for establishing an international standard for content designators. In August 1972, at IFLA General Conference in Budapest, the IFLA committee on cataloguing and the IFLA committee on mechanization jointly sponsored the IFLA Working group on Content Designators. This working group had the task for exploring the reasons for the differences between the different MARC formats arriving at a standard for the international exchange of data in machine readable form. To ensure coordination of efforts as widely as possible, all working papers were submitted to the ISO TC46/SC4 Working Group on Content Designators as well as to the UNISIST Working Group on Bibliographic Description which were both involved with formats for secondary services. As a result an international standard for content designators was taken up and this leads to the development of UNIMARC