The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is an international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries.

We acquire and preserve newspapers, journals, documents, archives, and other traditional and digital resources from a global network of sources. Most of the materials acquired are from outside the United States, and many are from the emerging regions of the world: Africa,  the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Latin America. 

We enable institutions to provide students, faculty, and other researchers liberal access to these rich source materials through interlibrary loan and electronic delivery. CRL loan and electronic delivery services are designed to support major research projects, the production of scholarly monographs and studies, dissertations, and graduate and advanced undergraduate seminars. 

Membership in CRL also permits librarians, specialists, and scholars at the member institution to participate in building this shared CRL corpus of research materials through the purchase proposal and demand purchase programs. Participation in these programs and in CRL collection Webinars and Global Resources Forums enables librarians to benefit from the enormous pool of collection-related expertise and knowledge available in the CRL community. Collection specialists at major U.S. and Canadian research institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Chicago, the University of California, McGill University, and the University of Toronto participate in these CRL programs.

CRL is based in Chicago and governed by a Board of Directors drawn from the research and higher education communities.