[6] As director of the programme, Ronald Milne had a central role in promoting its principles and coordinating its participants in a series of projects whose budgets amounted in total to around £30 million.
The RSLP projects sought to create a foundation for collaborative work in subject collection descriptions and catalogues to facilitate access for researchers.
[8] Within the strands of funding available for collection management projects and for research support for humanities and social sciences collections the John Rylands University Library of Manchester collaborated in 14 bids and eight of these were successful (in the bid related to Arabic and Persian research materials the library was the project leader).
These grants were made for the three years 1999/2000, 2000/01 & 2001/02; RSLP stated that "this is an activity which is of growing importance, and very much within the spirit of extending collaborative access to research facilities, but which is not currently supported through any of the other funding schemes".
In his advocacy of the project, Ronald Milne stressed that its primary purpose was to improve access to research materials through their electronic availability rather than to create an alternative format for their preservation: "digitisation on such a scale represents a revolution in the dissemination of information that parallels the impact of the invention of printing from moveable type in the 15th century.