Association of College & Research Libraries
Harvard, Yale, Columbia, NYPL Form Consortium
The Research Libraries Group, a consortium of four major American research libraries (the Research Libraries of the New York Public Library and the libraries of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia), has announced the completion of its organizational study and the commencement of one of the most important cooperative undertakings to occur in the research library field in decades.
The Research Libraries Group (RLG) will be incorporated as an entity, separate from any of its constituents, all of whom will be represented on its board. RLG plans, through cooperative organization, to promote the economical development of collections, preservation and conservation techniques, and more flexible reciprocal access to resource material and computer-based catalog information. It is the intention of the founding libraries that RLG should be expanded as soon as practicable to include research libraries in other parts of North America.
Rising costs, changing technology, and a more sophisticated and demanding pattern of user traffic have presented problems which are impeding research and scholarly inquiry.
Immediate plans of RLG include the appointment of a director and the establishment of a bibliographic information center at Yale which will collect and disseminate information on the holdings of the four libraries. The center will expedite access to the resources of the participants, which total 26 million volumes in 3,000 languages and dialects, as well as millions of manuscripts, maps, and microtexts.
A high priority project is the establishment of a computer-based catalog of holdings of periodicals and government documents, etc., in the four libraries. This will not only improve services in these libraries but will also serve as a model for other research library cooperative endeavors.
An investment on the order of ten to fifteen million dollars will be required for the developmental phase of this massive cooperative venture. ■ ■
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