This online help contains a list of places and their associated two- or three-character lowercase alphabetic codes.  The list includes individual codes for presently existing national entities, states of the United States, provinces and territories of Canada, divisions of the United Kingdom, and internationally recognized dependencies.  The purpose of this list is to allow the designation of the place associated with an item by codes in the MARC record for that item.  The list contains 362 discrete codes, of which 45 are discontinued codes no longer valid for use.

The list was originally compiled in 1967/68 in collaboration with a number of agencies and the Library of Congress MARC Pilot Project participants.

The list published here includes all valid and obsolete codes as of May 2003.  This revised edition includes 1 newly assigned code.  Appendix A lists all changes since the 2000 edition.

See also:

Introduction