The purpose of the Cataloging in Publication (CIP) program is to serve the nation's libraries by cataloging books in advance of publication. Publishers participating in the CIP program submit the full text of eligible publications to the Library of Congress. The Library creates a catalog record (known as CIP data) for each publication and sends it to the publisher who in turn prints the record on the verso of the title page.

In this way a catalog record is immediately available to each library that acquires a copy of the book, thereby saving libraries the time and expense of individually cataloging each book they acquire.

The Library of Congress also distributes these records weekly in machine readable form to large libraries, bibliographic services, and book vendors around the world. Many of these organizations redistribute these records in products and services designed to alert the library community to forthcoming publications and to facilitate book ordering.

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