Interactive version of the statistics from the Association of Research Libraries

"ARL Publishes Celebrating Research: Rare and Special Collections from the Membership of the Association of Research Libraries

ARL has published a book and Web site profiling selected rare and special collections in major research libraries of North America, Celebrating Research: Rare and Special Collections from the Membership of the Association of Research Libraries.Celebrating Research book cover

The compendium is a sampling of the abundance and variety of collections available for use. Special collections have been broadly construed to encompass distinctive, rare and unique, emerging media, born-digital, digitized, uncommon, non-standard, primary, and heritage materials.

Celebrating Research includes 118 collection profiles, each from a different ARL member library."

Special Collections in ARL Libraries: Results of the 1998 Survey Sponsored by the ARL Research Collections Committee
by Judith M. Panitch, 2001

"Adopted by the ARL Board of Directors in February 2003. This document underscores the individual and collective responsibility of ARL institutions to collect, preserve, and provide access to primary source materials."

Summary of the ARL TF work on special collections, including hidden collections

This white paper was written in 2003 on behalf of the ARL Task Force on Special Collections.   A nice overview of the issues, with recommendations for follow-up

"Metadata is often called "data about data." It has been used by various communities creating geospatial data, social and scientific data sets, enterprise applications, data warehouses, educational resources, and bibliographic data. In the traditional library world, catalog records are metadata, as they contain information about the library's collection of "data," i.e., the books and journals that make up its collections. Increasingly, libraries have been adopting emerging metadata standards such as Dublin Core, EAD, MODS, and TEI to describe, discover, preserve, manage, and provide access to electronic resources and digital objects.

This SPEC survey investigated how metadata is implemented in ARL member libraries: which staff are creating metadata and for what kinds of digital objects, what schemas and tools they use to create and manage metadata, what skills metadata staff need and how they acquire them, and the organizational changes and challenges that metadata has brought to libraries."

"Preservation is a fundamental role and responsibility of the research library," according to a new statement from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), "Research Libraries' Enduring Responsibility for Preservation."

"With digital information forming a growing share of the cultural record-joining a variety of analog formats-a new level of attention needs to be focused on preservation strategies. Research libraries must continue to invest in local preservation activities while increasingly engaging in collaborative preservation activities as well."

Discusses "U of Chicago initiatives related to "uncovering hidden collections," leveraging cooperative collection development and faculty partnerships"

Survey to Identify Common Interests in Unprocessed Collections, 2004

8/21/07:  search uinterface to survey not working 

Summary of the discussions at the Sept. 2003 conference

"In Google's Broad Wake: Taking Responsibility for Shaping the Global Digital Library," by Richard K. Johnson, brings together a number of articulations of core library interests in digitization partnerships, identifies six key interests against which potential agreements should be evaluated, and urges libraries and their institutions to "make full use of whatever leverage they have to ensure the global digital library is open and dynamic."

ARL has redesigned its website

Short article compares stats from 1985/86 with 2005/06 for ARL libraries