The Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) is a national initiative, which has been funded by the four higher education funding bodies It has brought together both traditional and new forms of access to library information, with specific reference to support for research. While the principal beneficiaries of the Programme will be researchers and their
postgraduate research students in UK higher education institutions, there will also be significant benefits for other groups. It started in the academic year 1999-2000 and finished on 31 July 2002, with funding totalling almost £30m having been awarded during the lifetime of the Programme.

The Programme's overarching vision is to facilitate the best possible arrangements for research support in UK libraries. The programme has been 'managed', and has attempted to take a holistic view of library and archive activity throughout the UK.

In very general terms, the activities which the Programme has funded are broken down into three strands: (a) collaborative collection management projects (in any subject area); or (b) projects that provide support for humanities and social science research collections. In practice, many of the projects contain a number of elements of different types of work. Strand (c), the Access strand, seeks to compensate major holdings libraries for costs
incurred in providing facilities for visiting researchers from other HEIs.

Funding totalling £11.4m has been made available for fifty-three projects, as well as a number of other activities underpinning the Programme's collaborative vision. A further £15m has been made available over three years to a total of forty-eight higher education libraries under the Access strand.

RSLP projects have mainly been dealing with traditional library materials but, in almost every case, have created an electronic resource. These take the form of bibliographic and archival records, collection descriptions, digitised images and texts, and web directories and portals. The Programme has also funded, or co-funded, a number of studies and other pieces of work, which we believe assist in facilitating access and have resonance within the
academic research community.

Most of the projects funded by RSLP are discipline oriented, although one or two focus on a format. Academic fields where the projects are expected to have a particularly significant impact include archaeology, art history, art and design, business studies, geography, history, non-European languages and area studies, theology and church history. The research community as a whole will benefit from projects which have sought to map research collections in UK regions: RASCAL (Research and Special Collections Available Locally) has recorded resources in Northern Ireland, while Mapio Cymru, a project led by the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, has mapped the library and archive resources of the Principality. Among other activities, SCONE (Scottish Collections Network Extension) has been identifying research collections in the newer universities, as well as in other higher
education institutions in Scotland and has extended the Research Collections Online database to include information relating to them. There have been major collaborative collection management projects for Asian studies and for Russian and East European studies, and projects that seek to facilitate access to such diverse materials as pamphlets, aerial photographs, early manuscript and printed maps of Scotland, cartoons and
architectural drawings.

In making RSLP funding available under its Access strand, the HE funding bodies have pioneered support for facilitating and extending collaborative access to major research facilities. While RSLP has not wanted to be over-prescriptive about the uses to which the Access monies may be put, institutions have been very strongly encouraged to apply the funding in the spirit of the Programme. Funds have been applied to support a wide variety of activities and improvements, including: extending opening hours, retrospective cataloguing, other enhancements to catalogues, equipment replacement, installation of access control systems, employment of extra staff to improve service in Special Collections and Archives departments, and improvement of physical facilities for researchers.

The concept of distributed national collection of library research resources (the 'Distributed National Collection', or 'DNC') promoted by the Programme has achieved a strong acceptance in the library community, and collaborative cross-sectoral work which will contribute to its development has now featured on the agenda of other funding agencies. A major thrust of the Research Support Libraries Programme has been to encourage higher education institutions to work consortially and with the national libraries, other research
libraries and public libraries in order to move towards this vision.

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Other RSLP Projects at Lampeter

Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP)

Following the award of grants under the second round of the RSLP (July 2000), the Founders' Library has been taking part in a number of other collaborative projects with other universities in the UK finishing in the autumn of 2002.

Wales 1801-1919

A collaborative project with six other Higher Education institutions in Wales led by the University of Wales Bangor, to convert or upgrade existing records for an on-line Union Catalogue of Wales-associated books and pamphlets at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Lampeter has contributed over 5,500 records.

Purpose of the project

The project aims to enhance access by researchers to printed material relating to Wales published in the period 1801-1919. This material is widely dispersed throughout Wales and the UK, and because so much of it is unknown, its potential for research has been largely unexploited.

Collections included in the project

The items included in the project derive chiefly from the former Welsh Library, assembled from the original foundation collections - given by the Founder, Thomas Burgess (1756-1837), Bishop of St David's, and Thomas Phillips (1760-1851), a former surgeon in the East India Company - and later donations, and from the Cenarth Collection (acquired in 1904) which comprised all the Wales-associated items from the extensive library of the Revd. D. H. Davies (1828-1910). Other items in the project come from the library of Edwin Morris (1894-1971), Archbishop of Wales, and a few from the former school library of St John's College, Ystrad Meurig (1757-1974). Besides literature, history, antiquities and topography and a substantial collection of pamphlets, the Welsh collection is particularly strong in religious writing, and includes many editions of the Bible and Prayer Book, hymnbooks, prayers and other devotional writings, sermons and catechisms, as well as translations of religious classics. There is also an important collection of over 750 Welsh ballads and hundreds of early nineteenth-century Welsh
periodicals, pamphlets and almanacs - important research material for the social and
cultural history of Wales.

Revelation: Unlocking Research Resources for 19th and 20th-century Church History and Christian Theology

A collaborative project with ten other University libraries in England and Scotland, led by the University of Birmingham, for the retrospective conversion of 145,950 catalogue records which will be made accessible to researchers world-wide through the on-line catalogues of these university libraries.

Purpose of the project

The aim of the project is to enhance awareness of, and access to, the most substantial collections for research into 19th and 20th-century Church History and Christian Theology. In addition to the retrospective conversion of catalogue records for monographs in these fields, the project has created a web-based guide mapping the most important research collections housed in up to 36 university, public, or specialized libraries in the UK. Work on the project was completed in October 2002, and Lampeter has contributed 3,480 new records to the University's on-line catalogue and upgraded over 8,600 existing records.

Scope of the project at Lampeter

The project covers books in all fields of theology and church history published since 1801. The foundation collections given by Thomas Phillips (1834-52) and the books bequeathed by Thomas Burgess in 1837 are particularly rich in biblical studies and languages, church history, patristics, homiletics, spirituality, domestic piety and religious education. Also included is the library of Professor Thomas Wood (1919-87) on ethics, moral and pastoral theology, part of the library of the poet and Tractarian, Isaac Williams (1802-65), and a small hymn-book collection.

Mapping Research Resources in Wales - Collections Wales

Purpose of the project

The project, led by the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, will enable the academic community in the UK to make more effective and shared use of research collections in and about Wales by creating an on-line research inventory that will map locations of the collections, describe their contents in a systematic fashion and enable scholars to make informed judgements about their relevance, accessibility and value for research.

Scope of the project

The project extends well beyond the university sector by including the holdings of the National Library of Wales and other significant public sector institutions, whilst the electronic database also acts as a gateway to both physical and electronic resources held elsewhere in the UK and overseas by including links to appropriate websites, databases, and on-line catalogues.

The Project at Lampeter

Lampeter has contributed brief descriptions (at collection-level) of eight of its research collections, including the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Archive (until recently at Oxford) and four from the University Archives, consisting of the deposited papers of individuals scholars associated with the institution: Alfred Edwin Morris (1894-1971), sometime professor of Hebrew and Theology, and later bishop of Monmouth and archbishop of Wales; G O Williams (1913-90), sometime lecturer, and later bishop of Bangor and archbishop of Wales; Thomas Wood (1919-87), sometime professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology; and Dom Illtyd Evans, O.P. (1913-72), sometime student, and later a noted writer andapologist. Further details of these can be found in the Archives web-site, under Collections