The Research Information Network has released Creating Catalogues: Bibliographic Records in a Networked World .
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
Against this background the RIN report: Creating Catalogues: bibliographic records in a networked world, is a very timely overview of the whole process of bibliographic record production for printed and electronic books, and for scholarly journals and journal articles. This report follows the production of these data from publisher through a range of intermediaries to the end user. Whilst there are pressures to make these data more freely available, each player in the process has its own motivations and business models in creating, adding to, using or re-using bibliographic data, all of which need to be considered.
We find that there would be considerable benefits if libraries, along with other organisations in the supply chain, were to operate more at the network level but that there are significant barriers in the way of making significant moves in that direction.
Creating Catalogues cannot attempt to solve all the problems in the way of making bibliographic data more freely available for re-use and innovation, or of eliminating wasteful duplication of effort. Our objective is to clarify the key issues and to stimulate debate on possible ways forward. Creating Catalogues provides a number of key recommendations and the RIN will work with the academic library community and other key stakeholders in the supply chain to raise awareness and understanding of the issues raised in this report, of the benefits to be achieved by moving to new models, and of how we might overcome the barriers to achieving them.
