Our mission: RLG Programs supports research institutions in collaboratively designing the future. RLG Programs works with and for its partner organizations, enhancing their ability to support research in all its forms.
Our agenda: This is a time of unusual uncertainty and significant disruption for research libraries, archives and museums. Their basic services are being challenged by large information hubs. Their institutional constituencies are increasingly bypassing them and satisfying their information needs by other means. We believe that a critical part of the institutional response must be via renewed, revivified collaborative action.
The combination of RLG Programs and OCLC Research staff provides a venue for that collaboration and a significant resource to support the necessary action.
With our partners, we have a point of view about the current information context, the institutional operating environment and the implications for the future of research collections. Read our Information Contexts outlook.
Based on this view of the future, RLG Programs in concert with its advisors and partners has committed itself to a work agenda that can impact this future, preserve and renew the value of research libraries, archives and museums and ensure that they are important in the emerging new processes by which research is done and learning occurs.
The themes where we have chosen to focus our effort were conditioned by the skills and capacities resident in our new division, the mission of the OCLC enterprise in which the division is situated, the ability to engage issues over a multi-year horizon, and the specific research focus of the RLG Partner institutions. We have broad guidelines for deciding where to invest effort.
Our work agenda will be dynamic and influenced by our partners but the following broad themes represent persistent areas of shared uncertainty and change for the communities we serve. They will guide us as we identify priorities and maximize our impact.
The overall aim is to enhance the ways libraries, archives, and museums create value in the research and learning process. This makes it important to directly engage with and support new forms of research teaching, and learning. Our first theme focuses on this topic.
The next three themes embody professional ways libraries, archives, and museums create that value. In each case, they are reengineering structures and practices to better support networked environments, support new behaviors, and introduce efficiencies. Major areas of attention here are managing aggregate or collective collections, evolving descriptive practices, and developing new service frameworks.
The last two themes are about assuring maximum reach of that created value through interoperability based on architecture and standards, and improvement based on measurement and observation.
We welcome your interest and comments or questions about our work.
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