MARC Applications for Description for Visual Materials

For over a decade, there has been an ongoing dialogue between the library and the visual resources communities concerning the adaptation of MARC formats to meet the specialized descriptive requirements of archives, museums, and art collections. The discussion has risen to a new level of intensity as visual resource collections strive for enhanced outreach and visibility via the World Wide Web. This paper will survey major areas of concern regarding the use of MARC to convey visual information, including the particular problems associated with description and retrieval of images, harmonization of metadata standards, collection level description, and so forth. It will also consider the continuing viability of MARC in light of the emergence of new data standards such as SGML and XML.