The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries is an association of a number of libraries in

Colorado Colorado is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States. It is one of the Mountain states, sharing the Four Corners region with Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. It is also bordered by Wyoming to the north, Nebraska to the northeast, Kansas ...

and

Wyoming Wyoming ( ) is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States, Western United States. It borders Montana to the north and northwest, South Dakota and Nebraska to the east, Idaho t ...

Purpose

The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries was established in 1974. One major purpose of the Alliance is to share resources and provide the best terms and price to its members by group purchasing.Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries home page
Retrieved April 2007. Projects of the Alliance over the years include: * Prospector, a unified catalog of

academic An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of tertiary education. The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, founded approximately 386 BC at Akademia, a sanctuary of Athena, the go ...

public In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociology, sociological concept of the ''Öf ...

, and other libraries in Colorado and Wyoming (current) * Gold Rush, a database of online article resources (fulltext journals and abstracts) and access options (current) * Alliance Digital Repository, a consortial repository service supporting the preservation of, management of, and access to digital content (current) * CARL and UnCover (historical) Prospector also provides a faster and more convenient mechanism for

interlibrary loan Inter-library loan (abbreviated ILL, sometimes called document delivery, document supply, inter-lending, inter-library services, inter-loan, or resource sharing) is a service that enables patrons of one library to borrow materials that are held by ...

s from member libraries, which can be ordered by patrons directly from the catalog.

CARL and UnCover

CARL started as a character-based access system to resources, in particular catalogs of participating libraries as they were being computerized, available via dialup long before the advent of

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

. The CARL system eventually included a subset of Dialog. The flagship CARL product was ''UnCover'', an article index database. UnCover provides free article search and access to the article text for a fee. CARL was spun off in 1988 into a for-profit company, later owned by Knight-Ridder and then Dialog before becoming briefly Uncover, Inc. In 2000, UnCover was acquired by Ingenta and is now accessible as a part of Ingentaconnect.

Member libraries

These libraries are members of the Alliance:

References

External links

* Bibliographic database providers Cooperatives based in Colorado 1974 establishments in Colorado Library consortia in Colorado Library consortia in Wyoming Library consortia with members in multiple states {{Library-org-stub