Nuclear reaction rates are obviously quantities of fundamental importance in nuclear astrophysics. Important effort has been devoted in the last decades to measure reaction cross sections and many experimental compilations have now become available. Despite such effort, many nuclear astrophysics applications still require the use of theoretical predictions to estimate experimentally unknown rates. Most of the nuclear ingredients in the calculations of reaction rates need to be extrapolated in an energy or/and mass domain out of reach of laboratory simulations. In addition, important astrophysical applications (in particular the r‐ or p‐processes of nucleosynthesis) often involve a large number (thousands) of unstable nuclei, so that only global approaches can be used. For these reasons, when the nuclear ingredients to the reaction models cannot be determined from experimental data, use is made preferentially of microscopic or semi‐microscopic global predictions based on sound and reliable nuclear models which, in turn, can compete with more phenomenological highly‐parametrized models in the reproduction of experimental data.The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) addressed recently through a Coordinated Research Project on the Reference Input Parameter Library (RIPL) the difficult task of collecting, evaluating and recommending the vast amounts of various nuclear parameters of relevance in cross section calculations. The RIPL project is targeted at users of nuclear reaction codes and, in particular, at nuclear data evaluators for applications as large as energy production, accelerator driven waste incineration, production of radioisotopes for therapy and diagnostics, charged particle beam therapy, material analysis and astrophysics. A brief overview of the nuclear input parameters recommended by the RIPL is presented.Simultaneously, the need to develop more microscopic input parameters has led to new developments that have been compiled in the Brussels Nuclear Astrophysics Library, known as BRUSLIB. The content of the BRUSLIB library is described, with a special emphasis on the latest results concerning the determination of ground state properties within the Hartree‐Fock‐Bogoliubov approach. © 2004 American Institute of Physics