The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) will manage a cooperative project for creating online serials records for the National Register of Microform Masters (NRMM). The three major research libraries which will cooperate with ARL in the project are Harvard University Library, the Library of Congress, and the New York Public Library. Together these institutions hold close to 50 percent of the estimated 60,000 serials in the NRMM Master File. The project is funded by a newly awarded grant of $395,865 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The participant institutions are contributing substantial additional funding. On behalf of research libraries, OCLC is making an in-kind contribution of $63,472.
The three participant institutions will be responsible for preparing their reports and validating their holdings to allow inclusion of exact holdings information. The Library of Congress also will be responsible for the quality assurance program. Under contract with the OCLC Retrospective Conversion Services, 290,522 serials records will be input into the CONSER database and in the OCLC Online Union Catalog.
This is the next phase of a complex, multi-year effort to provide online access to more than half a million bibliographic records for preservation microform masters. In January 1994, API completed the project for the retrospective conversion of the approximately 529,000 monographic reports in the NRMM Master File. With the exception of reports in non-Roman alphabets and records with insufficient information, all monograph reports are now available in the national bibliographic utilities.
[Contact: Association of Research Libraries, 21 Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C. 20036; (202) 296-2296; Fax (202) 872-0884.]
