MAB

Description of MAB
MAB stands for Maschinelle Austauschformat für Bibliotheken, which roughly translates in English to “machine readable data exchange format for libraries”. This bibliographical metadata interchange format is the most widely used format in the German-speaking world. The actual version of this metadata format is MAB2, which supports the exchange of data relevant to the library domain such as bibliographical data, name authority files, corporate bodies authority files and local data. As a consequence of a decision made by the German National Library’s Office of Library Standards in 2004, MAB2 is currently being phased out and replaced by the international standard MARC 21.

Austrian National Library
For Austrian libraries, country specific extensions have been added to the common MAB definition and thus have to be taken into account when providing data to DM2E or Europeana in general. Moreover, some differences between the internal MAB model used within Aleph based systems and the general MAB2 specification have been discovered during ONB’s mapping process to the DM2E data model. Therefore, the MAB2-DM2E mappings produced by ONB are “out-of-the-box” mainly applicable to libraries in German-speaking countries using Aleph based library systems. Nevertheless the effort to adapt ONB’s mapping to other MAB2 based source models will be manageable if necessary.