RLG news release Jennifer Porro 04 Mar 1992 01:41 UTC
----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The following is a news announcement from the Research Libraries Group. BRITISH LIBRARY JOINS RLG Research Libraries Group welcomes first overseas member, opens new chapter of international collaboration MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 3, 1992 -- The Research Libraries Group, Inc. (RLG) is pleased to announce that the British Library has become an RLG general member. In announcing this news, J. Michael Smethurst, the British Library's director general of London Services, said: "We have worked closely with RLG for a number of years, and the time is now right for a closer relationship. We want to develop new ties with the major research libraries and the scholarly community in the United States; because RLG works with both the library-bibliographic world and the scholarly world, it is a good organization for us to be associated with." "The British Library's decision to join," said RLG president James Michalko, "gives us the wonderful opportunity to make real the rhetoric about the internationalization of scholarship. We look forward to working with the British Library staff, and perhaps with some of their European colleagues, to really make global connections among the various communities of scholars that will serve all our interests." Richard De Gennaro, librarian of Harvard University, which also recently became a general member of RLG, welcomed the BL announcement: "This is genuinely exciting news for the North American library community. It signals a new era of cooperation among the major libraries of the U.S. and Western Europe." Two areas of expected collaboration within the RLG framework are collection preservation and the enormous challenge of online access to the world's historic collections, of which those at the British Library and Harvard University are two prime examples. Smethurst commented, "We hope to contribute to the development of improved access to collections, to bibliographic work, and to networking in general. Very often American concepts and technology are on the frontiers of such efforts, and we would like to join RLG there in a shared exploration of new ways of tackling problems." With the British Library an active RLG member, London will become RLG's European hub for telecommunications with its information system, RLIN. This will reduce costs to European institutions that enter data into RLIN. RLG will welcome the chief executive of the British Library, Dr. Brian Lang, to RLG's annual meeting in California on June 25, where he will give the keynote address. For further information, contact Jennifer Hartzell, RLG Director of Corporate Communications, BL.JLH@RLG.BITNET or BL.JLH@RLG.STANFORD.EDU.