n. (also MARC Format for Archives and Manuscript Control, abbr. MARC AMC or AMC)a data structure standard for transmitting archival descriptionHensen 1986, 32The MARC Archival and Manuscripts Control (AMC) format has the potential to change the lives of archivists forever. The format provides a structure for description that is not only fully consistent with archival principles but also compatible with modern bibliographic description.Zboray 1987, 211These limited local applications of data base management systems scarcely required the descriptive depth and standardization demanded by MARC AMC. Few archivists on their own would create a data base file with MARC AMC’s seventy-seven variable data fields with each having from one to twenty subfields.Bearman 1989a, 26The MARC Format for Archives and Manuscript Control (MARC-AMC) was designed with the potential for recording a broad range of information and contains structures for a variety of implementations. These hidden potentials are being explored in its implementation within national bibliographic networks, especially within the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) by the Seven States Project. The AMC format has the potential both to support successful automation of archival control and to transform the bibliographic utilities as we know them today.Spindler and Pearce-Moses 1993, 333The study identified some particularly effective display formats, but it also recognized that MARC AMC records presented some additional problems because of their length and complexity.Martin 1994, 482U.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.Stielow, Hankins, and Jones 1995, 467MARC AMC depends on the expensive and time-consuming norm of “original cataloging.”Hensen 1997, 284The work of the National Information Systems Task Force in creating the MARC AMC format and the concomitant development of Archives, Personal Papers, and Manuscripts helped define the basic framework of shared archival description.Russell and Hutchinson 2000, 177In recent years, the archival community has given much attention to the idea of adapting standard bibliographic cataloging processes in order to describe the kinds of materials often held by archives and other depositories. This adaptation has become increasingly common in recent years, as the special MARC AMC format was eliminated in favor of a single bibliographic format for MARC records that describes all formats of materials and the underlying and unifying principles that can be used to describe both published and unpublished materials.Rubinstein 2017, 302Archivists in the early 1970s began to develop an individual MARC format that outlined how to use the emerging MARC encoding standard to describe archival data. The MARC Format for Archives and Manuscript Control (MARC AMC) captured basic collection-level information about archival collections and holdings, and, even though it would never be able to capture the complexity of traditional archival description, it gave archivists a standard for structured data that allowed them to make use of the same systems as librarians.Sweetser and Orchard 2019, 332With the development of the MARC AMC (Machine Readable Cataloging Archives and Manuscripts Control) standard, the archival profession added a new tool to increase discoverability of archival materials. While imperfect in its representation of archival hierarchy and relationships, its structure conformed enough to traditional archival description that many repositories chose to implement the MARC AMC standard, thus enabling representation of archival collections alongside library materials in library catalogs and bringing together the realms of archival and bibliographic description.
