MARC21 is a standard or a format for the representation and communication of descriptive metadata about information items such as documents, books and so on. It was developed and used by library of congress at united state, and today is a well known standard for using at many libraries around the world. MARC XML is a framework for using MARC data as XML format.

As a requirement for capturing and storing more than 700,000 information items, about 2 TB documents, as national projects, we consult them to use WSS 3.0 for storing metadata also documents on different site collections and using a simple workflow to make relation between them. 

As you know we have Document libraries to store documents and Lists for keeping metadata about those documents. So, all we need is to supporting MARC's specifications as Site Columns and type of information's items that they need to keep metadata about; like governmental reports, geographical maps and so on; as Site Content Types.

It was very complicated to get familiar with MARC standard to add some new features to SharePoint for supporting these formats. It was a six month hard working project, but now, take a look to the result.

For more information about this feature go to the official web site of SharePoint Solutions

Also take a look to the Project Details

To find some technical details about developed feature, go to the Mr. Hosseini Technical blog