Description and Goals RLG Cultural Materials Initiative Description and Goals Cultural materials include published and unpublished texts, images of many types, artifacts and other objects. Better access is equally important to the sustained health of libraries, archives, museums and other cultural repositories. Although historians, cultural anthropologists, folklorists, historical archaeologists, historic preservationists, and a host of other researchers rely on cultural resources, there is currently no adequate capability for searching across the significant collections that reside in dispersed institutions around the world. Only a small amount of this kind of information is currently available in electronic form and building a sufficiently large resource to support this kind of inquiry is an imperative for many institutions. Teaching increasingly demands access to a large corpus of surrogates for cultural materials.
Repositories increasingly seek revenue associated with the off-site use of collection surrogates.
To address these issues, RLG member institutions will come together in this new initiative. Goals of the Initiative Organize an alliance of RLG member institutions to address collaboratively the issues described above. This will be a multiyear program and will consolidate recent progress in digital collection development and metadata practices. Participants will leverage institutional capabilities along with the RLG infrastructure and distribution capabilities to provide access to a critical mass of unique and rare materials. Participants will ensure that the initiative is responsive to the variety of institutional imperatives, market opportunities, and needs of the research community.