c) Information about non-book materials ranging from musical scores, films, videos, serials, maps, and recordings, to archival collections and machine-readable data files;
d) Unique on-line access to special resources, such as the United Nations' DOCFILE and CATFILE records, and the Rigler and Deutsch Index to pre-1950 commercial sound recordings; and
e) International book vendors' in-process records that can be transferred by bibliographers, acquisitions libraries, and catalogers to create citations, order records, and cataloging in their local systems.
In RLIN, particularly valuable sources of processing information are available on-line:
a) A catalog of computer files: Machine-readable data files are of value to a growing number of disciplines. RLIN contains records describing a wide array of such files, from the full-text French literary works in the ARTFL Database to the statistical data collected by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan;
b) A catalog of archives and special collections: The archival and manuscript collections of research libraries, museums, state archives, and historical societies contain essential primary resources, but information about their contents has often been elusive. Archivists and curators worked with RLG to create an automated format for these collections. There are close to 500,000 records available in RLIN for archival collections located throughout North America. These records analyze many collections by personal name, organization, subject, and format.
Complementing the central bibliographic files of RLIN is the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), an invaluable research tool for scholars in English culture, language, and literature. This file provides extensive descriptions and holdings information for letterpress materials printed in Great Britain or any of its dependencies in any language, from the beginnings of print to 1800 - as well as for materials printed in English anywhere else in the world. Produced by the ESTC editorial offices at the University of California, Riverside, and the British Library, in partnership with the American Antiquarian Society and over 1,600 libraries worldwide, the file continues to be updated and expanded daily. ESTC serves as a comprehensive bibliography of the hand-press era and as a census of surviving copies.
ESTC included 420,000 records as of June 1998. It contains records for items of all types published in Great Britain and its dependencies or in English anywhere in the world from the beginnings of print (1473) through the 18th century - including materials ranging from Shakespeare and Greek New Testaments to anonymous ballads, broadsides, songs, advertisements and other ephemera. Extensive indexing includes imprint word, place, genre, and year as well as copy-specific notes. Searches may also be limited by date, language and country of publication.
8.3. Future Trends for On-Line Catalogs
The future of catalogs is linked to the harmonization of the MARC format. While MARC is an acronym for Machine Readable Catalogue or Cataloguing, this general description is rather misleading as MARC is neither a kind of catalogue nor a method of cataloguing. According to UNIMARC: An Introduction, a document of the Universal Bibliographic Control and International MARC Core Programme, MARC is "a short and convenient term for assigning labels to each part of a catalogue record so that it can be handled by computers. While the MARC format was primarily designed to serve the needs of libraries, the concept has since been embraced by the wider information community as a convenient way of storing and exchanging bibliographic data."