The UK’s Research Information Network has just published (June 2009) a new report, Creating Catalogues: bibliographic records in a networked world (Direct PDF link). It gives an…

“overview of the whole process of bibliographic record production for printed and electronic books, and for scholarly journals and journal articles [ and the ] motivations and business models” […] “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.”

Of course if someone built a better works-out-of-the-box open source automatic citation parser and harvester, especially one that was able to hook into a browser addon and thus harvest from every page a scholar views…