Archive - Historical Material

The Global Resources Program (GRP) seeks to improve access to international research materials through cooperative structures and the use of new technologies. GRP, a joint initiative of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), has launched six projects to test varying models of access. Ultimately, the projects will lead to the reallocation of resources and a truly cooperative collection and access model. The six projects include the Cooperative African Newspapers Project, the German Resources Project, the Japan Journal Access Project, the Latin Americanist Research Resources Project, the Digital South Asia Library, and the Southeast Asia Journals Indexing Project.

The six projects are in different stages of development and have different levels of North American and international participation. However, these projects have the following common challenges and potential barriers: different copyright regulations, varying charging and payment options and the expense currency exchange, the lack of common technical standards to exchange requests, varying lending policies and administrative commitment, varying levels of access to holdings and holdings information in various online sources, and the need to secure a "behavioral change" among collection development officers and interlibrary loan librarians. The presentation will review these challenges and barriers and will suggest strategies to overcome those issues. The realisation that North American research libraries are no longer able to collect comprehensively provides an opportunity for the global interlibrary loan community to provide access to and delivery of materials needed by scholars and researchers, regardless of location of the material or the scholar.