RLG Partnership Current Tiers and Dues

Annual partnership dues, which are based on the size of your organization, support the collaborative work of the RLG Partntership.  The program year begins on July 1 and concludes on June 30; dues for institutions newly joining at any point in the year will be pro-rated.

Dues are calculated on the basis of an institution’s operating budget.  We understand that "Operating budget" can be a slippery concept. The unit of measure RLG Programs uses is the library (or library system) in a college, university, historical society, or museum. For national and state libraries and archives, the whole institution is the focus.

All Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) and Society of College, National, and University Libraries (SCONUL) members currently report their library operating budget data to those organizations, deriving it from standard definitions.  RLG Programs will use the latest submitted figure to determine the correct dues band and annual dues rate for its members that belong or are qualified to belong to ARL or SCONUL. For all other members, the relevant figure will be determined by applying the ARL operating expense definition to data in your most recent published financial statement. The ARL definition includes:

• expenditures for materials
• expenditures for binding
• salaries and wages
• other operating expenditures (example, automation)

—but not facilities, facility maintenance, and fringe benefits. (For specifics, see Expenditures, the penultimate topic under section III, subsection 3, at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/ddoc.doc.)

To enable partner institutions to maintain and take advantage of their RLG Partnership affiliation in the current economic climate, we reconsidered our dues levels and structure. With the help of the RLG Partnership Council, we modified the current dues tiers and costs. The new (reduced) and previous RLG Partnership dues and structures are provided for comparison below. The new dues and tiers went into effect with the new Partnership year that began on July 1, 2009.

The new structure simplifies the tiers and provides a substantive reduction in financial contribution from partner institutions that is appropriately distributed across categories. Although the lowest dues category remains unchanged at US$4,000, the structure provides reductions throughout the other tiers that range from 18-40%. While this reduction in dues is significant, it will not change the current level of investment in and support for the work undertaken by the RLG Partnership.

RLG Partnership Tiers and Annual Dues Effective July 1, 2009