ble 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."

MARC II established certain principles which have been followed consistently
over the years. In general terms, the MARC communication format is i