We look forward to working with the British Library staff, and perhaps with some of their European colleagues, to really make global connections among the various communities of scholars that will serve all our interests. It signals a new era of cooperation among the major libraries of the U.S. and Western Europe. Two areas of expected collaboration within the RLG framework are collection preservation and the enormous challenge of online access to the world's historic collections, of which those at the British Library and Harvard University are two prime examples. Very often American concepts and technology are on the frontiers of such efforts, and we would like to join RLG there in a shared exploration of new ways of tackling problems. RLG will welcome the chief executive of the British Library, Dr. Brian Lang, to RLG's annual meeting in California on June 25, where he will give the keynote address.
Additional tables cover law, medical, Canadian and non-university research libraries.
Gordon Fretwell, consultant to the Committee on ARL Statistics and compiler of the survey, highlights in his introduction some of the recent trends and gives particular attention to the salaries of minority librarians in ARL libraries. Salaries and setting policies are issues which bear on recruitment, retention and rewarding of qualified library professinals. This price includes shipping and cumulative updates. It is also available in a a CD-ROM version. The CD-ROM will contain records of the 500,000 books which have been received by the British Library Document Supply Centre since 1980.