MAchine-Readable Cataloging (MARC)

"The MARC formats are standards for the representation and communication of bibliographic and related information in machine-readable form".

The formats have been developed in the 1960er years and are mainly used to exchange catalog records among libraries and/or library consortias. A quite comprehensive introduction to the formats can be found in Wikipedia

Tools

 * http://oregonstate.edu/~reeset/marcedit/html/index.php - MARC edit
 * http://www.indexdata.com/yaz/doc/yaz-marcdump.html - to read MARC records and display them in various formats