The Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) was a national initiative, funded by the four higher education funding bodies. It has brought together both traditional and new forms of access to library information, with specific reference to support for research. While the principal beneficiaries of the Programme have been researchers and their postgraduate research students in UK higher education institutions (HEIs), there have also been significant benefits for other groups. It started in the academic year 1999-2000 and finished on 31 July 2002, with funding totalling almost £30m awarded during the lifetime of the Programme.
The Programme’s overarching vision was to facilitate the best possible arrangements for research support in UK libraries. The programme has been ‘managed’, and has attempted to take a holistic view of library and archive activity throughout the UK.
In very general terms, the activities which the Programme has funded can be broken down into three strands: (a) collaborative collection management projects (in any subject area); or (b) projects that provided support for humanities and social science research collections. In practice, many of the projects contained a number of elements of different types of work. Strand (c), the Access strand, sought to compensate major holdings libraries for costs incurred in providing facilities for visiting researchers from other HEIs.
Funding totalling £11.4m was made available for fifty-three projects, as well as a number of other activities underpinning the Programme's collaborative vision. A further £15m was disbursed over three years to a total of forty-eight higher education libraries under the Access strand. An additional £5 million was subsequently made available by the funding bodies for an extension to the Access strand to compensate higher education libraries for the use made of their facilities during AY 2002-2003.
RSLP projects have mainly dealt with traditional library materials but, in almost every case, have created an electronic resource. These have taken the form of bibliographic and archival records, collection descriptions, digitised images and texts, and web directories and portals. The Programme has also funded, or co-funded, a number of studies and other pieces of work, which we believe have assisted in facilitating access and have resonance within the academic research community.
Most of the projects funded by RSLP have been discipline oriented, although one or two have focussed on a format. Academic fields where the projects have had a particularly significant impact include archaeology, art history, art and design, business studies, geography, history, non-European languages and area studies, theology and church history. The research community as a whole will benefit from projects which have sought to map research collections in UK regions: RASCAL (Research and Special Collections Available Locally) has recorded resources in Northern Ireland, while Mapio Cymru, a project led by the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, has mapped the library and archive resources of the Principality. Among other activities, SCONE (Scottish Collections Network Extension) has identified research collections in the newer universities, as well as in other higher education institutions in Scotland and has extended the Research Collections Online database to include information relating to them. There have been major collaborative collection management projects for Asian studies and for Russian and East European studies, and projects that seek to facilitate access to such diverse materials as pamphlets, aerial photographs, early manuscript and printed maps of Scotland, cartoons and architectural drawings.
In making RSLP funding available under its Access strand, the HE funding bodies have pioneered support for facilitating and extending collaborative access to major research facilities. While RSLP has not wanted to be over-prescriptive about the uses to which the Access monies may be put, institutions have been very strongly encouraged to apply the funding in the spirit of the Programme. Funds have been applied to support a wide variety of activities and improvements, including: extending opening hours, retrospective cataloguing, other enhancements to catalogues, equipment replacement, installation of access control systems, employment of extra staff to improve service in Special Collections and Archives departments, and improvement of physical facilities for researchers.
The concept of a distributed national collection of library research resources (the ‘Distributed National Collection’, or ‘DNC’) promoted by the Programme has achieved a strong acceptance in the library community, and collaborative cross-sectoral work which will contribute to its development has now featured on the agenda of other funding agencies. A major thrust of the Research Support Libraries Programme has been to encourage higher education institutions to work consortially and with the national libraries, other research libraries and public libraries in order to move towards this vision.
The Steering Group that has provided strategic direction for the Programme:
The RSLP Office is based in Edinburgh University Library. The Programme Director was Ronald Milne, and the Programme Administrator is Gill Davenport. (Contact details)
Colour and black and white versions of the RSLP logo for projects to use for publicity purposes are available to download.
Content: Gill Davenport
Last updated 10 October 2002