The URBS network was incorporated officially in February 1992, through the efforts of libraries from five different countries (British School, American Academy, Swedish Institute, Norwegian Institute and the Danish Academy), which formed a consortium with the Vatican Library, under the aegis of the International Union of Institutes of Archaeology, History and History of Art.

In reality, the bases for collaboration and for a union catalogue had already been laid down in the 1980s, when the librarians of the American Academy in Rome and the British School exchanged catalogue cards and began meeting together. They were soon joined by the librarians of the Swedish Institute, Norwegian Institute and Danish Academy, thus creating an informal, non-technical network. Around the same time (1986, to be precise), the Libera Università Maria Santissima Assunta (which would not officially join the network until 1992) had joined the Vatican Library in acquiring a common online cataloguing system.

In March 1990 the British School organised a meeting and invited representatives of the American Academy, the Swedish Institute, the Danish Academy, the Austrian Institute, the Norwegian Institute, the Belgian Academy, and the Dutch Institute to examine the possibility of a formal collaboration.

Informal contacts followed between five of these institutes and Father Leonard E. Boyle, then Prefect of the Vatican Library, who on April 3, 1990, invited them to view the Geac8000 system of the Vatican Library. The five institutes accepted his offer to use the server at the Vatican Library and to take advantage of the automation knowhow of its Centro Elaborazioni Dati (CED) to build a common network and to begin automating their own catalogues.

Little by little the group grew larger, first by admitting other institutes as observers and as participants in study groups and then by welcoming them as proper members—this was the case for the French School and for the Dutch Institute.
Today URBS is composed of 14 institutional members, chiefly academies and research institutes of several nations: Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the United States. The mission of the network, whose bibliographic holdings are chiefly in the humanistic disciplines, is to provide its users with a union catalogue of specialised libraries in Rome.