NELINET, Inc. was an American not-for-profit membership cooperative of academic, public, school and special libraries and other information and cultural organizations in New England (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont).
Another activity was to act as a cooperative purchasing agent for electronic resources such as an academic databases, online journals and e-books.
The mission of NELINET was to collaborate with its member libraries, and with other regional, national and international partners, to create opportunities for connections, collaboration, and cooperation among members to shape the future of New England libraries, museums, historical societies, and other related information organizations in the evolving information environment.
Topics included library-related items, such as open source projects, with leaders in the fields giving presentations.
On April 28, 1964, a meeting of the six state land grant university libraries was held at which they agreed that cooperative ventures in technical services such as using a computer to control acquisitions.
On August 15, 1966, the Council on Library Resources (CLR) awarded NEBHI a grant to design a regional cataloging and processing center for New England.
In December 1966, NEBHI requested and the Council of Library Resources later awarded another grant to develop a pilot project for a regional processing center.
The first test of the processing center using records derived from MARC tapes was a remote site, the University of New Hampshire library, occurred in December 1967.
The plan was to make the Southboro office the technical center of the company due to the new colocation facility and the Open Source Hosting services.