Washington Research Library Consortium | |
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38°52′31″N76°43′39″W / 38.87530161414513°N 76.72756410109851°W | |
Location | Marlboro, Maryland, United States |
Established | 1987 |
Other information | |
Website | www |
The Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC) was established as a non-profit corporation in 1987 to support research and instructional capabilities of eight universities in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. The WRLC is operated exclusively for the benefit of other non-profit institutions of higher learning by promoting the development of a cooperative network among libraries in the Washington metropolitan area and by providing services to enhance library and information resources. [1] It included the implementation of a telecommunications network linking all eight universities and their offsite campuses to an online database of 2.6 million library records and other information databases. Paul Vassallo was the first president and CEO of the non-profit. [2]
It is affiliated with the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area. WRLC aims to do this through expanding coordination between different research libraries in the area. Major services they provide include operation of a shared online catalog, hosting an annual meeting for people involved in DC-Area research libraries, and providing environmentally controlled additional storage space for books and other media.[ citation needed ] The executive director as of 2025 was Kim Armstrong. [3]
The combined collections of The Washington Research Library Consortium total more than 22 million items. This extraordinary resource, and its ready access, is essential to enabling the success of learning and scholarship.
The Consortium Loan Service (CLS) makes print materials easily available to the students, faculty and staff across the Consortium. Users may request the delivery of needed books or articles online with delivery within one or two days. In FY2024 and FY2025, over 20% of the books that have circulated have been borrowed from one of the partner universities. [4]
The Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area (CUWMA) is a nonprofit educational association of 20 colleges and universities in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, the Smithsonian Institution, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the United States Institute of Peace, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Jisc is a United Kingdom not-for-profit organisation that provides network and IT services and digital resources in support of further and higher education and research, as well as the public sector. Its head office is based in Bristol with offices in London, Manchester, and Oxford. Its current CEO is Heidi Fraser-Krauss, who joined in September 2021 from the University of Sheffield.
The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. Under the leadership of then UC President Richard C. Atkinson, the CDL's original mission was to forge a better system for scholarly information management and improved support for teaching and research. In collaboration with the ten University of California Libraries and other partners, CDL assembled one of the world's largest digital research libraries. CDL facilitates the licensing of online materials and develops shared services used throughout the UC system. Building on the foundations of the Melvyl Catalog, CDL has developed one of the largest online library catalogs in the country and works in partnership with the UC campuses to bring the treasures of California's libraries, museums, and cultural heritage organizations to the world. CDL continues to explore how services such as digital curation, scholarly publishing, archiving and preservation support research throughout the information lifecycle.
The State Library of Kansas is a department within the state government of Kansas, with locations in Topeka and Emporia. Ray Walling was appointed acting State Librarian in June of 2022. On January 19, 2023, Walling was confirmed by the Kansas Senate as the 18th Kansas State Librarian.
Project MUSE, a non-profit collaboration between libraries and publishers, is an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and electronic books. Project MUSE contains digital humanities and social science content from some 400 university presses and scholarly societies around the world. It is an aggregator of digital versions of academic journals, all of which are free of digital rights management (DRM). It operates as a third-party acquisition service like EBSCO, JSTOR, OverDrive, and ProQuest.
Intute was a free Web service aimed at students, teachers, and researchers in UK further education and higher education. Intute provided access to online resources, via a large database of resources. Each resource was reviewed by an academic specialist in the subject, who wrote a short review of between 100 and 200 words, and described via various metadata fields what type of resource it was, who created it, who its intended audience was, what time-period or geographical area the resource covered, and so on. As of July 2010, Intute provided 123,519 records. Funding was stopped in 2011, and the site closed.
A special library is a library that provides specialized information resources on a particular subject, serves a specialized and limited clientele, and delivers specialized services to that clientele. Special libraries include corporate libraries, government libraries, law libraries, medical libraries, museum libraries, news libraries. Special libraries also exist within academic institutions. These libraries are included as special libraries because they are often funded separately from the rest of the university and they serve a targeted group of users.
The Center for Research Libraries is a consortium of North American universities, colleges, and independent research libraries, based on a buy-in concept for membership of the consortia. The consortium acquires and preserves traditional and digital resources for research and teaching and makes them available to member institutions through interlibrary loan and electronic delivery. It also gathers and analyzes data pertaining to the preservation of physical and digital resources, and fosters the sharing of expertise, in order to assist member libraries in maintaining their collections.
Nylink was a non-profit, totally member-supported cooperative serving libraries and cultural heritage organizations of all types. Based in Albany, New York, Nylink included members located in New York State and surrounding areas. At its peak, Nylink's 300-plus member institutions included academic libraries, public libraries, library systems, corporate libraries, court libraries, government agency libraries, gardens, museums and other cultural heritage organizations. Additionally, Nylink had more than 2,000 affiliate institutions who participated in or acquired Nylink's services.
The non-profit Colorado Library Consortium (CLiC) is a library-related organization.
The State Library of Ohio is a state agency that provides services to state government and all types of libraries to ensure that all Ohio residents, rich or poor, rural or urban, receive the best possible library service and are able to engage in lifelong learning which strengthens the economic health of Ohio.
The University College Dublin Library, composed of five separate bodies, holds varied ranges of digital and printed books on a wide range of topics, including architecture, arts and humanities, business studies, engineering, law, medicine, science, social sciences and veterinary medicine. In 2015 UCD Archives and the National Folklore Collection UCD came under the administrative umbrella of UCD Library. University College Dublin (UCD) is the Republic of Ireland's largest university. It is located in Dublin, Ireland.
A library consortium is any cooperative association of libraries that coordinates resources and/or activities on behalf of its members, whether they are academic, public, school or special libraries, and/or information centers. Library consortia have been created to service specific regions or geographic areas, e.g., local, state, regional, national or international. Many libraries commonly belong to multiple consortia. The goal of a library consortium is to amplify the capabilities and effectiveness of its member libraries through collective action, including, but not limited to, print or electronic resource sharing, reducing costs through group purchases of resources, and hosting professional development opportunities. The “bedrock principle upon which consortia operate is that libraries can accomplish more together than alone.”
The German National Library of Science and Technology, abbreviated TIB, is the national library of the Federal Republic of Germany for all fields of engineering, technology, and the natural sciences. It is jointly funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the 16 German states. Founded in 1959, the library operates in conjunction with the Leibniz Universität Hannover. In addition to acquiring scientific literature, it conducts applied research in such areas as the archiving of non-textual materials, data visualization and the future Internet. The library is also involved in a number of open access initiatives. With a collection of about 8.9 million items in 2012, the TIB is the largest technology and natural science library in the world.
The Partnership for Peace Consortium is a network of over 800 defense academies and security studies institutes across 60 countries. Founded in 1998 during the NATO Summit, the PfPC was chartered to promote defense institution building and foster regional stability through multinational education and research, which the PfPC accomplishes via a network of educators and researchers. It is based at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. According to the PfPC Annual Report of 2012, in 2012 eight hundred defense academies and security studies institutes in 59 countries worked with the PfPC in 69 defense education/defense institution building and policy-relevant events. The Consortium publishes an academic quarterly journal CONNECTIONS in English and Russian. The journal is run by an international Editorial Board of experts and is distributed to over 1,000 institutions in 54 countries.
The Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) is a non-profit organization that specializes in providing research, programming, and organizational tools for libraries, archives, and museums in the New York metropolitan area. The council was founded in 1964 under the Education Law of the State of New York.
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The West Chicago Public Library is the public library serving the city of West Chicago, Illinois. It is located at 118 West Washington street in downtown West Chicago. The library has a collection of 83,711 items that includes books, audio CDs, movies, magazines, video games, and other nonbook materials making up their library of things, and recorded a total of 109,029 library visits in 2018. West Chicago Public Library is part of the System Wide Automated Network (SWAN), which connects 97 libraries in many Chicago suburbs. They are a member of OCLC's global cooperative and RAILS delivery service.