Georgetown Joins Research Library Group

At its meeting in October 1991, the Board of the Governors of the Research Libraries Group (RLG) voted to accept Georgetown University as a member of the organization. The membership is an institutional one, although the focus of activities and programs is in the area of the libraries.

RLG was formed in 1973 by the directors of the Harvard, Columbia and Yale University Libraries and the director of the New York Public Library. The original intention was to provide a cooperative forum for very large research libraries, to allow them as a group to provide services to their users that they could not provide individually. In the late 1970s, the organization changed and grew, opening its membership to institutions with research library collections. The current membership consists of 40 general research libraries and an additional 70 libraries with special, focused research collections.

RLG's programs include resource sharing (primarily interlibrary loan and photocopying), cooperative collection management, cooperative preservation programs and the development and maintenance of large data bases. The primary data base is the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN), which contains the catalog records of the member institutions and therefore forms the supporting tool for the resource sharing and collection management programs.

In addition, special data bases include, among others, the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalog, the Vatican catalog, the United Nations catalog, a data base of medieval and early modern demographic and business data and the Modern Language Association ongoing research file.

Specially focused programs of RLG include a law library program, an art library program, a music library program and a program for cooperative development of archival and manuscript material.

We expect the initial impact on the Georgetown community to be: the ability to borrow books and request photocopies from large research libraries that have until now been inaccessible to us; participation in the law program by the Edward Bennett Williams Law Library; and use of the archives and manuscripts control system by Special Collections.

We are pleased to be a part of this significant cooperative effort to make research information available to the nation's students and scholars.