From: Tony Gill <[log in to unmask]>

Improving Access to Cultural Materials:
Research Libraries Group announces new initiative
to provide integrated access to cultural materials worldwide

Mountain View, Calif., 7 January 2000 -- The Research Libraries Group has
made electronic access to cultural materials a priority in the opening
years of the 21st century. In a collaborative, international effort, the
organization will be creating shared access to high-quality images -- plus
descriptions -- of the works and artifacts that document culture and
civilization. The result will be a globally accessible, Web-based research
resource drawn from pre-eminent collections in RLG member institutions.

Cultural materials include published and unpublished texts, images,
objects, and artifacts of many types. For example, the Chicago Historical
Society holds architectural drawings, maps, and plans of the city. The New
York State Archives collections include Shaker furniture. The
International Institute of Social History in the Netherlands has extensive
collections of political posters, banners, broadsides, and recordings.

Reg Carr, director of university library services and Bodley's Librarian
at the University of Oxford, is chair of the RLG board of directors. Carr
explains that this new effort stems from strategic planning undertaken by
the board and management for the new century. "Given the quality and range
of scholarly research materials held in RLG member institutions and the
expertise of RLG staff and partners," he says, "the resulting resource and
service promises to make a major contribution to the electronic
accessibility and use of our collections. Importantly, too, it means our
members need not separately -- and expensively -- invent the same set of
wheels for the benefit of our different user communities."

Improving access to such materials is vital to the advancement of research
and learning, especially as the definition of "research data" expands in
many disciplines. Historians, cultural anthropologists, folklorists,
historical archaeologists, historic preservationists, and a host of other
researchers rely on such cultural resources. Only a small amount of this
kind of information is currently available in electronic form, and there
is no adequate existing ability to search across the significant
collections housed in institutions around the world.

Better access is equally important to the sustained health of the research
libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural repositories that hold
unique and underused collections of these objects. Building a sufficiently
large resource to support research is an imperative for many institutions.
Teaching and distance learning increasingly require access to surrogates
for cultural materials, and hard-pressed repositories increasingly seek
revenue, implicit in off-site use of collection surrogates.

James Michalko, RLG's president, notes that the initiative is "the next
step in 'improving access to information that supports research and
learning' -- a role the membership corporation has played for nearly 25
years." He credits "a very timely Ford Foundation grant" for helping RLG
to plan and shape RLG's cultural materials initiative with a core group of
committed RLG members: Chicago Historical Society, Cornell University
Library, the International Institute of Social History (Netherlands), the
New York State Archives, Library, and Museum,  Oxford University
Libraries, and Yale University Library.

Participants in RLG's initiative will develop best practices and
conditions for creating electronic surrogates of cultural materials. They
will also address institutional intellectual property mandates, contribute
to a collective, "critical mass" resource of unique or rare cultural
materials, and ensure that the resulting service is international,
representative, and self-sustaining.

"We are confident that this is a critically important and realistic
effort," concludes Michalko. "The accomplishments  expected within the
cultural materials initiative are consistent with the mission, history,
and operating capabilities of RLG and its international membership."

For more information, e-mail Anne Van Camp at [log in to unmask] or call +1
650-691-2237.

The Research Libraries Group (www.rlg.org or www.rlg.ac.uk) is a
not-for-profit membership corporation of over 160 universities, national
libraries, archives, historical societies, and other institutions. In
addition to a range of collaborative activities that address members'
shared goals, RLG develops and operates databases and software to serve
the information needs of member and nonmember institutions and individuals
around the world.



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