These electronic services are your source for MARC records, delivered via FTP (File Transfer Protocol). MDS offers cataloging records, available in original scripts, for materials in hundreds of languages, from Arabic to Yiddish, along with other non-roman alphabet languages such as Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, and Korean. MDS provides national level cataloging for almost all English-language imprints. Each service is available as a current-year (January-December) subscription or a retrospective file.
2024 MARC Distribution Services Prices
- Books All (database)
- Books English (database)
- Books U.S. (database)
- Classification (database)
- Complete Service (database)
- Computer Files (database)
- Copyright Cataloging: Monographs, Documents, and Serials (database)
- Copyright Select (database)
- Maps (database)
- Music (database)
- Name Authorities (database)
- Serials (database)
- Subject Authorities (database)
- Visual Materials (database)
MARC Open-Access
In addition to our MDS subscription service, we now offer an "open-access" provision, MDSConnect, at no cost to users. Our open-access service includes nearly 25 million MARC records, as distributed in the unabridged 2016 Retrospective file sets. These MDS record sets have been made available primarily for research and development usage. Records are available in two file formats - UTF8 and XML.
To explore this open data, please select from the links below. Within each link, you will be given the choice of selecting the file type (UTF8 or XML).
Please note that record sets are contained in zipped files and you may need to download several files.
- Books All
- Classification
- Computer Files
- Maps
- Music
- Name Authorities
- Serials
- Subject Authorities
- Visual Materials
Modern MARC
The Library of Congress has begun focusing its cataloging efforts on creating more “modern” MARC bibliographic records. Among other changes, discussed below, these records will include less coded data in fixed fields in favor of textual data in variable fields, to align with Resource Description & Access (RDA), LC’s current cataloging code, and more identifiers. There will be no large scale retrospective conversion of records; these changes will be introduced organically, as LC catalogers perform their duties and themselves alter their cataloging practices to reduce data redundancy. Read more (PDF, 136KB)
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