A bibliographic record is an entry being a uniform representation and description of a specific content item in a bibliographic database

Bibliographic database

A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records, an organized digital collection of references to published literature, including journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents, books, etc...

 (or a library catalog

Library catalog

A library catalog is a register of all bibliographic items found in a library or group of libraries, such as a network of libraries at several locations...

), containing data elements required for its identification and retrieval, as well as additional supporting information, presented in a formalized bibliographic format. The additional information may support particular database functions such as search, or browse (e.g. keywords), or may serve fuller presentation of the content item in the database (e.g. article's abstract). Bibliographic records are usually retrievable from bibliographic databases by author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

, title

Title

A title is a prefix or suffix added to someone's name to signify either veneration, an official position or a professional or academic qualification. In some languages, titles may even be inserted between a first and last name...

, index term, or keyword. Bibliographic records can represent a wide variety of published contents, including traditional paper, digitized

Digitizing

Digitizing or digitization is the representation of an object, image, sound, document or a signal by a discrete set of its points or samples. The result is called digital representation or, more specifically, a digital image, for the object, and digital form, for the signal...

 or born-digital

Born-digital

The term born-digital refers to materials that originate in a digital form. This is in contrast to digital reformatting, through which analog materials become digital. It is most often used in relation to digital libraries and the issues that go along with said organizations, such as digital...

 publications. The process of creation, exchange, and preservation of bibliographic records are parts of a larger process, called bibliographic control

Bibliographic control

In library and information science, bibliographic control is the process by which information resources are described so that users are able to find and select that information resource. An information resource could be a book, a movie, or an image, among other things...

.

History

The earliest known bibliographic records come from the catalogues (written in cuneiform script on clay tablet

Clay tablet

In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age....

s) of religious texts from 2000 B.C., that were identified by what appear to be key words in Sumerian. In ancient Greece

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

, bibliographic records were recorded on wooden tablets called pinakes

Pinakes

Pinax may refer to:*Pinax, a votive tablet that served as a votive object deposited in a sanctuary or burial chamber*Pinakes, a 3rd-century-BCE work by Callimachus, the first library catalog system*Pinax...

.

Formats

Today's bibliographic record formats originate from the times of the traditional paper-based isolated libraries

Library

In a traditional sense, a library is a large collection of books, and can refer to the place in which the collection is housed. Today, the term can refer to any collection, including digital sources, resources, and services...

, their self-contained collections and their corresponding library cataloguing systems. The modern formats, while reflecting this heritage in their structure, are machine-readable and most commonly conform to the MARC standards

MARC standards

MARC, MAchine-Readable Cataloging, is a data format and set of related standards used by libraries to encode and share information about books and other material they collect...

.
The subject bibliography databases (such as Chemical Abstracts, Medline, PsycInfo, or Web of Science) do not use the same kinds of bibliographical standards as does the library community. In this context is the Common Communication Format the best known standard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataloging#Common_Communication_Format