The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries is an association of a number of libraries in

Colorado Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the wes ...

and

Wyoming Wyoming () is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It is bordered by Montana to the north and northwest, South Dakota and Nebraska to the east, Idaho to the west, Utah to the southwest, and Colorado to the s ...

Purpose

The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries was established in 1974. One major purpose of the Alliance is to share resources and provide the best terms and price to its members by group purchasing.Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries home page
Retrieved April 2007. Projects of the Alliance over the years include: * Prospector, a unified catalog of

academic An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, ...

public In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the ''Öffentlichk ...

, and other libraries in Colorado and Wyoming (current) * Gold Rush, a database of online article resources (fulltext journals and abstracts) and access options (current) * Alliance Digital Repository, a consortial repository service supporting the preservation of, management of, and access to digital content (current) * CARL and UnCover (historical) Prospector also provides a faster and more convenient mechanism for

interlibrary loan Interlibrary loan (abbreviated ILL, and sometimes called interloan, interlending, document delivery, document supply, or interlibrary services, abbreviated ILS) is a service where patrons of one library can borrow materials and receive photocopies ...

s from member libraries, which can be ordered by patrons directly from the catalog.

CARL and UnCover

CARL started as a character-based access system to resources, in particular catalogs of participating libraries as they were being computerized, available via

dialup Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telep ...

long before the advent of

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

. The CARL system eventually included a subset of

Dialog Dialog is an online information service owned by ProQuest, who acquired it from Thomson Reuters in mid-2008. Dialog was one of the predecessors of the World Wide Web as a provider of information, though not in form. The earliest form of the Dial ...

. The flagship CARL product was ''UnCover'', an article index database. UnCover provides free article search and access to the article text for a fee. CARL was spun off in 1988 into a for-profit company, later owned by

Knight-Ridder Knight Ridder was an American media company, specializing in newspaper and Internet publishing. Until it was bought by McClatchy on June 27, 2006, it was the second largest newspaper publisher in the United States, with 32 daily newspaper bran ...

and then Dialog before becoming briefly Uncover, Inc. In 2000, UnCover has been acquired by Ingenta and is now accessible as a part of Ingentaconnect.

Member libraries

These libraries are members of the Alliance:

References

External links

* Bibliographic database providers Cooperatives in the United States 1974 establishments in Colorado Library consortia in Colorado Library consortia in Wyoming Library consortia with members in multiple states {{library-stub