ABSTRACT
The development of the USMARC Format for Holdings and Locations has opened up many exciting opportunities for controlling and using holdings data in automated library systems and for communicating and sharing holdings data among individual libraries, library consortia, and bibliographic utilities. Although the USMARC Formats are primarily communications specifications designed to facilitate the transmission of data from one computer system to another, they have also had a tremendous influence on the way that bibliographic and authority data is handled locally within individual systems. This is not an insignificant benefit to the library community as it promotes a certain level of consistency in thinking about what kinds of data are important to libraries and to their users, why the data is important, and how we should best utilize it.
