Bibliographic records play a central role in enabling users to find, locate and gain access to books and journals. The records are created and enhanced at different stages in a supply chain from publishers, through a range of intermediaries, to libraries and then to end-users. The digital revolution has brought changes in the processes through which records are created and made available for use along this chain. Each actor has its own motivations, aligned to its particular business model, in creating, adding to, using or reusing bibliographic data; and each uses models and formats that suit its purposes. These formats are then frequently modified to meet the needs of those further along the chain. This report looks at how bibliographic records for content held by UK academic and research libraries are created and distributed, for printed and electronic books, and for scholarly journals and journal articles; and at how they are utilised by all involved in the supply chain, from the publisher to the final end user. Bibliographic data plays a particularly important role for academic and research libraries. These libraries need good bibliographic data to fulfil their mission of supporting research, learning and teaching. They devote considerable resources to acquiring, managing and creating data, so that their users can find the content they hold, and so they can manage their stock and ensure it meets the needs of their users. But the established ways of achieving those ends are coming under increasing challenge from two related sources: • a perception that these traditional processes involve unnecessary duplication of effort which could be reduced or eliminated, and • a belief that new web-based, aggregated services, developed by a wide range of organisations, provide better ways of creating and sharing a more comprehensive set of high-quality records, as well as offering much more attractive services for end-users. Academic and research library catalogues are not prominently visible in an online environment dominated by large-scale aggregations of information. Bibliographic data relating to significant amounts of the content they hold in physical form, and to the greater proportion of the material to which they provide online access under licence agreements, are not included in their catalogues. Users therefore make use of other services to discover and gain access to the information sources they need, even when those resources have been purchased and made available by the library. There is also increasing interest from Government in making the information generated in, and by, public sector organisations more widely available for re-use, to generate greater economic benefit, social gain, and improvements to public services.
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