Viewing the Field: A Literature Review and Survey of the Use of U.S. MARC AMC in U.S. Academic Archives

Abstract

U.S. MARC AMC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging for Archives and Manuscript Control) has "come of age," taking its place in the mainstream of both archival and cataloging thinking, theory, and practice. The meteoric rise in the use of MARC AMC is evident in the statistics reported by the bibliographic utilities. The literature of MARC AMC, although extensive, has not been reviewed since 1989 and does not systematically document the use of the format in U.S. academic archives. This paper presents a review of that literature and reports the results of a 1992 survey of 200 archivists, representing 200 academic archives in the United States. These respondents were randomly selected from the Society of American Archivists' 1991 Directory of Individual Members; they cooperated in a survey examining the use of MARC AMC for cataloging archival and manuscript collections. This paper profiles the institutional use of MARC AMC, including the choice of a cataloging standard, such as Steven Henson's Archives, Personal Papers and Manuscripts, Second Edition (APPM, Second Edition) and Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, Second Edition, Revised (AACR2R), chapter 4. The paper concludes with an admonition for archivists and traditional catalogers to work collaboratively to catalog archival and manuscript collections.

Adoption and diffusion of Encoded Archival Description

“…This latter theory would confirm Fichman and Kemerer's (1997) findings on the importance of related knowledge and diversity of technological knowledge in lowering the barriers to knowledge acquisition to make way for adoption of new technologies. Interestingly, studies of the diffusion of MARC demonstrated a similar pattern of adoption by colleges and universities (Martin, 1994;Stout, 1984).…”