4 other countries and
territories."

Both complementary and different from the OCLC Online Catalog (WordCat) with its
38 million records (with one record per document), the Research Libraries
Information Network (RLIN) includes 88 million records (with several records per
document).

RLIN is run by by the Research Libraries Group (RLG). The central RLIN database
is a union catalog of nearly 88 million items held in comprehensive research
libraries and special libraries in RLG member institutions, plus over 100
additional law, technical, and corporate libraries using RLIN. It includes:

a) Records that describe works cataloged by the Library of Congress, the
National Library of Medicine, the U.S. Government Printing Office, CONSER
(Conversion of Serials Project), The British Library, the British National
Bibliography, the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, and RLG's
members and users;

b) Comprehensive representation of books cataloged since 1968 and rapidly
expanding coverage for older materials;

c) Information about non-book materials ranging from musical scores, films,
videos, serials, maps, and recordings, to archival collections and
machine-readable data files;

d) Unique on-line access to special resources, such as the United Nations'
DOCFILE and CATFILE records, and the Rigler and Deutsch Index to pre-1950
commercial sound recordings; and

e) International book vendors' in-process records that can be transferred by
bibliographers, acquisitions libraries, and catalogers to create citations,
order records, and cataloging in their local systems.

In RLIN, particularly valuable sources of processing information are available
on-line:

a) A catalog of computer files: Machine-readable data files are of value to a
growing number of disciplines. RLIN contains records describing a wide array of
such files, from the full-text French literary works in the ARTFL Database to
the statistical data collected by the Inter-university Consortium for Political
and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan;

b) A catalog of archives and special collections: The archival and manuscript
collections of research libraries, museums, state archives, and historical
societies contain essential primary resources, but information about their
contents has often been elusive. Archivists and curators worked with RLG to
create an automated format for these collections. There are close to 500,000
records availa