The Research Libraries Group (RLG) was a

U.S. The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

-based

library A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vir ...

consortium that existed from 1974 until its merger with the OCLC library consortium in 2006. RLG developed the

Eureka Eureka (often abbreviated as E!, or Σ!) is an intergovernmental organisation for research and development funding and coordination. Eureka is an open platform for international cooperation in innovation. Organisations and companies applying th ...

interlibrary search engine, the RedLightGreen

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...

bibliographic Bibliography (from and ), as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology (from ). English author and bibliographer John Carter describes ''bibliography ...

descriptions, and

ArchiveGrid ArchiveGrid is a collection of over five million archival material descriptions, including MARC records from WorldCat and finding aids harvested from the web. It contains archival collections held by thousands of libraries, museums, historical ...

, a database containing descriptions of

archival An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or ...

collections. It also developed a framework known as the "RLG Conspectus" for evaluating research library collections, which evolved into a set of descriptors used in library collection policy statements, last updated in 1997.Collecting Levels
. Library of Congress. loc.gov. Retrieved 2017-06-19. The

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library ...

used the conspectus in 2015 in the revision of its own collection policy statement, and decided to retain this resource on its website, as a helpful scale for judging an academic collection's depth.

History

RLG was founded in 1974 by four major

research libraries A research library is a library which contains an in-depth collection of material on one or several subjects.(Young, 1983; p. 188) A research library will generally include an in-depth selection of materials on a particular topic or set of to ...

: the New York Public Library and the university libraries of Columbia, Harvard and

Yale Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...

; it was incorporated as a not-for-profit membership organization in 1975."History of the OCLC Research Library Partnership"
OCLC Research. oclc.org/research. Retrieved 2017-06-21. RLG was established in part due to dissatisfaction among research institutions with the record-keeping of the OCLC library consortium. In 1978 RLG moved its offices, which were originally in

Branford, Connecticut Branford is a shoreline town located on Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut, about east of downtown New Haven. The population was 28,273 at the 2020 census. Geography According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a to ...

(not far from New Haven), to Stanford University; and it adopted Stanford Library's BALLOTS computerized processing system. This system evolved into the online database RLIN (Research Libraries Information Network), which notably included bibliographic data representing JACKPHY (non-Roman) scripts. RLIN was generally used only by library specialists; in 1993 RLG developed Eureka as a user-friendly interface for use by non-librarians. In 1988 RLG moved its offices to

Mountain View, California Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it has a population of 82,376. Mountain View was integral to the early history and growth of Silicon Valley, and is the ...

. In the meantime its membership had expanded to include other research libraries in the U.S., and by 1989 reached 100 members. In 1992 the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...

became the first member outside North America. As of 2003, RLG's membership included over 160 research institutions in 15 different countries. In July 2006, RLG and OCLC officially initiated a merging of their organizations and resources.Wilson, Lizabeth; Neal, James; Jordan, Jay (October 2006). "RLG and OCLC: Combining for the Future" (guest editorial). ''Library and Information Science''. Vol. 6, no. 4. Retrieved via ''Project Muse'' database, 2017-06-21. The completion of this process took place over a five-year period, through June 2011. RLG's catalog became part of OCLC's

WorldCat WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the O ...

. Its programs joined with OCLC Research to become OCLC Programs and Research. Eureka databases were migrated to OCLC's FirstSearch service. An RLG staff of reduced size was relocated from Mountain View to San Mateo, California.Guide to the Research Libraries Group, Inc. (RLG) records
. Stanford University Libraries, Manuscripts Division. Retrieved 2017-06-22.

References

{{authority control Bibliographic database providers Cooperatives in the United States Library consortia OCLC