It's worth to note that it's a standard, not the standard - even that page includes multiple variations, and there are other transliteration standards officially used in various places (e.g. the Russian international passports transliterate names a bit differently than ISO 9), so you can't really do "Cyrillic<->Latin can be done with clarity and consistency", you get different inconsistent transliterations of the same name and also it's not 100% reversible, especially if you don't know how it was transliterated.
For example, the (quite common) name Юрий has been transliterated as Yuriy, Yurij, Yurii, Yuri, Juriy, Jurij or even other options.
Also, you can't transliterate from Cyrillic, you can transliterate from a particular language, since any phonetic transliterations will be slightly different between, for example, Russian and Ukrainian - even ISO 9 accounts for that, so a sequence of letters without context can't be sufficient for transliteration, the exact same sequence of cyrillic letters may have to be transliterated differently depending on its language.
Pedantry: I think you can transliterate from Cyrillic. But you can't transcribe from Cyrillic.
There are situations in which you have to transliterate, rather than transcribe, because you don't know what language it is. For example, it's a name in a list of names of people from different places.
Sure, you can do that if you want or have to, but you won't be able to do it consistently or properly - you simply have to accept that some of your transliterations will be different than the official/proper transliterations of the same names, that the some of these people will have an official ID in Latin alphabet with a different name than what you wrote. And this is not a theoretical situation, such issues with wrong transliterations (and somebody missing a name because they're searching for a different spelling, or someone being offended because you wrote their name wrong) tend to appear ocasionally in various international sporting events, law enforcement and medicine/casualty situations.
There are no "official/proper transliterations" other than the ones you create for your institution, which is probably an academic library because I've not heard of anyone else caring about consistent transliteration. I've seen the same Greek and Russian names transcribed in all sorts of ways in government documents. Fortunately, all government documents have some kind of a number on them. That's what you use for your database key. Names aren't unique in any case, even with the extra variation introduced by whimsical transcription.
