About RSLG - Our vision:

Our core concern is how to ensure that researchers working in the UK can have access to the full range of world-class information resources. This entails a focus on delivery: ensuring that individual researchers can have easy access to the information that they need wherever this may be located. The twin pressures of rising costs and volume of materials have already brought us to the point where no library can realistically aim to collect and hold all of the materials that its users require.

We believe that within (and beyond) our planning horizon most researchers will be working with the hybrid library, employing technology as an aid to access and to information handling wherever appropriate. by "the hybrid library" we mean a mixture of materials in hard copy and electronic form, drawn from a variety of sources and locations - with the range and nature of the mix varying for researchers in different subject areas and research environments. Researchers will increasingly be able to obtain much of what they want directly from the desktop. Technology is already widening access to rare and historic materials in "heritage" collections, and to the major research collections of the world, as well as supporting a new generation of online datasets. Nonetheless, for many researchers the possibility of physical access to particular bodies of material will continue to be important even if this may also be read online.

We need to identify strategies for making better use of existing resources to bring this about. Librarian and libraries will continue to play a critical role in meeting reserachers' information needs - though they will also face the challenge to evolve in response to changing demands. We see an increasing emphasis on collaboration between information providers, each playing a distinctive part within a more actively planned and co-ordinated national (or even international) system and structure.

The challenge in implementing our vision will be to harness the energy and commitment which institutions and librarians currently devote to meeting the needs of their own distinct user groups in support of the distributed national hybrid library meeting the needs of all UK researchers

Last updated 24 October 2001