Consistency, Extent, and Validation of the Utilization of the MARC 21 Bibliographic Standard in the College Libraries of Assam in India.

This paper brings light to the existing practice of cataloging in the college libraries of Assam in terms of utilizing the MARC 21 standard and its structure, i.e., the tags, subfield codes, and indicators. Catalog records from six college libraries are collected and a survey is conducted to understand the local users' information requirements for the catalog. Places, where libraries have scope to improve and which divisions of tags could be more helpful for them in information retrieval, are identified and suggested. This study fulfilled the need for local-level assessment of the catalogs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]