Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries

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

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.^[1] Projects of the Alliance over the years include:

• Prospector, a unified catalog of academic, public, 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 loans 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 long before the advent of World Wide Web. The CARL system eventually included a subset of the Dialog. 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^[2] into a for-profit company, later owned by Knight-Ridder^[3] and then Dialog^[4] before becoming briefly Uncover, Inc. In 2000, UnCover has been acquired by Ingenta^[5] and is now accessible as a part of Ingentaconnect.

Member libraries

These libraries are members of the Alliance:

Library	University
Arthur Lakes Library	Colorado School of Mines
Auraria Library	Community College of Denver Metropolitan State College of Denver University of Colorado Denver - Denver Campus
CSU Libraries	Colorado State University
Denver Public Library	N/A
Health Sciences Library	University of Colorado Denver - Anschutz Medical Campus
Jefferson County Library	N/A
Kraemer Family Library	University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
Penrose Library	University of Denver
Regis Libraries	Regis University
Tomlinson Library	Colorado Mesa University
Tutt Library	Colorado College
University Libraries	University of Colorado at Boulder
UNC Libraries	University of Northern Colorado
UW Libraries	University of Wyoming

References

1. ^ Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries home page. Retrieved April 2007.
2. ^ Knight-Ridder to acquire UnCover (Leticia Alvarez) SERIALST: Serials in Libraries Discussion Forum, 1995
3. ^ A new day dawns: KRI acquires CARL. (Knight-Ridder Information), Searcher, September, 1995
4. ^ Dialog Sells Carl And Uncover To Ward Shaw, Online Newsletter, March, 1999
5. ^ Ingenta plc 2000 Annual Report