Charting The European Printed Heritage

The Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council and the Department of Education for Northern Ireland are funding this UK-wide initiative. Funding to higher education institutions started in academic year 1999-2000 and will finish at the end of academic year 2001-2002, with up to £30M being disbursed over the three years.

The Research Support Libraries Programme derives from the deliberations of the Follett Review (1993) and the associated Anderson Report (1996). It brings together both traditional and new forms of access to library information, with specific reference to support for research. The principal beneficiaries of the Programme will be researchers employed in UK HEIs and their postgraduate research students, though there will be significant benefits for other groups. The Programme is intended to meet, in a library context, the need for collaboration and sharing in the use of the research infrastructure envisaged more generally by the Dearing and Garrick reports.

For more information on this programme you can visit http://www.rslp.ac.uk

In August 1999 the Early Printed Books Project was awarded funding for three years from the RSLP specifically to catalogue foreign books printed between 1641 and 1800. This project, entitled Charting the European Printed Heritage 1641-1800, aims to catalogue a further 19,000 post-1641 foreign titles, in 18 Oxford libraries. Additional funding in May 2000 extends the coverage to include 6,600 items printed between 1459 and 1640, which are held in only one copy in the libraries of Oxford University, outside the Bodleian.