26 November 1999
| To: | Vice
Chancellors/Principals and Librarians/Directors of Information Services at HEFCE/SHEFC/DENI/HEFCW-funded institutions |
Dear Vice-Chancellor/Principal/Librarian/Director of Information Services,
In July of this year the HE Funding Bodies Research Support Libraries Programme announced decisions on bids for the first round of funding for Collection Management Projects and projects for Research Support for Humanities and Social Sciences Collections. This letter announces the funding for the other principal strand of the Programme, grants to compensate institutions with important holdings libraries for the services that they provide to research staff and research students from institutions other than their own. This is an activity which is of growing importance, and very much within the spirit of extending collaborative access to major research facilities, but which is not currently supported through any of the other funding schemes.
The methods used to calculate awards to institutions are set out in Annex A. The awards set out in Annex B are for the years 1999/2000, 2000/2001 and 2001/2002. These awards will be added to institutions’ grants from their Funding Council/DENI and will be paid in equal monthly amounts. Arrangements, if any, for continuation beyond 2001/2002 will be subject to evaluation and would clearly depend, at least in part, on how institutions use the grant in the first two years of funding.
Awards are made to each institution on the absolute condition that access to all its libraries and archives wholly or partly supported from University unrestricted funds is made available to academic teaching and research staff and research postgraduate students (as defined for HESA purposes) of all UK HEIs on the same terms and at the same opening hours as for staff and research students of similar standing in the home HEI. It is a further condition that no registration or other special fee shall be charged to those coming from another HEI that does not also apply to staff and research students of the home institution. In any case where such fees have been charged to visiting UK HEI staff or postgraduates in the current financial year, free access must be provided for a minimum of three years from 1st January 2000 or some other date to be agreed with the RSLP office.
In making sums available to RSLP under this strand, the Funding Bodies have pioneered support for facilitating and extending collaborative access to major research facilities. As part of the evaluation of this important new venture, RSLP has therefore been asked to collect annual information on the use made by institutions of these funds, in the expectation that institutions will wish to use a significant part of them to, for example, improve available information about their research collections on the internet or in other ways so as to encourage more use of them by external researchers, to bolster access to them through enhanced opening hours or improved facilities for researchers, and/or to invest in more extensive conservation or cataloguing of important classes of material. Institutions may also wish to invest in improved access monitoring systems, bearing in mind that future allocations, if any, after 2001/2002 may be based in part or in whole on auditable accounts from such systems.
Yours faithfully
Professor Michael Anderson
Chairman, RSLP Steering Group
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Content: Gill Davenport
Last updated 26 November 1999