The library at the University of California, Riverside will receive one of 27 prestigious National Leadership Grants for Libraries. The grant will help improve the INFOMINE search engine, which was created at UC Riverside.

The library will receive a $249,581 federal grant, which the campus will match, according to UC Riverside officials and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency that supports the nations libraries and museums. The IMLS is issuing $7 million in National Leadership Grants for Libraries this year.

The UC Riverside Library developed INFOMINE in 1994. Its growth has been a collaborative effort with librarians at other UC campuses, the California State University, Wake Forest University, the University of Detroit, and others. INFOMINE contains over 40,000 links to academically valuable resources worldwide. INFOMINE is linked with MELVYL, the online catalog to the collections of the libraries of all nine UC campuses; and Scotty, the online catalog of UC Riverside library collections.

The UC Riverside grant represents IMLS' research and demonstration focus, one of two project areas, which also include preservation or digitization. The research and demonstration area funds projects to enhance library services through the effective use of new technologies; improves library users' abilities to utilize information systems, such as databases and search engines; or helps in evaluating library services.

UC Riverside's grant will fund the research and design of free software to improve the functioning and integration of the INFOMINE search engine with others, such as the Librarians' Index to the Internet; the Internet Public Library; the BUBL (originally the Bulletin Board for Libraries) Information Service, developed at the University of Glasgow; and the Virtual Reference Library, Developed at the University of Toronto. Together these interconnected search engine projects offer users more than 150,000 links to expert selected resources. They represent a high quality, highly used Internet resource available to scholars, researchers and students. The projects support over 30 million searches annually.

Other research universities receiving grants include UC Berkeley, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Michigan State, and Stanford. More than 90 libraries competed for the grants with proposals totaling more than $24 million.
For more information about the grants and about INFOMINE, visit the following Web sites:
www.imls.gov/whatsnew/new_imls.htm
http://infomine.ucr.edu

The University of California, Riverside offers undergraduate and graduate education to nearly 15,000 students and has a projected enrollment of 21,000 students by 2010. It is the fastest growing and most ethnically diverse campus of the preeminent ten-campus University of California system, the largest public research university system in the world. The picturesque 1,200-acre campus is located at the foot of the Box Springs Mountains near downtown Riverside in Southern California. More information about UC Riverside is available at www.ucr.edu or by calling 909-787-5185.