The origins of MAB trace back to 1973, when a national exchange format was initiated in Germany under the leadership of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB) together with the Arbeitsstelle für Bibliothekstechnik (ABT).
A comprehensive revision of MAB led to the new format version MAB2 in 1995 after two years of development work.
[2] With the introduction of the Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND) in April 2012 the delivery of authority data in MAB format by the DNB was discontinued.
The approach of the MAB is therefore more geared towards the linking of semantically related components than to the comparatively static structure of the MARC formats.
This makes it possible to transport MAB data via XML-based exchange protocols such as OAI-PMH or SRU.