Open standards and software for bibliographies and cataloging

If there's one area where you would expect strong standards to emerge, this is it. Bibliographic data typically needs to be structured, searchable, shareable etc.

Strangely, however, this domain seems to have lagged behind in terms of informational and technical standards. As Bruce D'Arcus and John J. Lee put it:

For scholars and researchers, among the most essential metadata is bibliographic. Being able to reliably store, find, use and communicate bibliographic data is a basic need of academic research. And yet the state of bibliographic software is largely stuck in the 1980s.

Bruce and John have published an excellent resource, Open standards and software for bibliographies and cataloging, with what looks like a comprehensive list.

This was previously published at http://blog.sockdrawer.org and was retrieved from the Internet Archive.