Festina Lente

Occasional commentary from CRL’s president

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CRL is a platform for building community and facilitating collaboration among academic and independent research libraries, powered by the knowledge, expertise, ideas, and energy in its community. Festina lente (“make haste, slowly”) is a place where that collective intelligence is shared and those collective efforts are acknowledged and advanced.

Recent Blog Entries

Community and Collective Action

September 5, 2019

CRL's new president Gregory Eow has posted an inaugural blog, Festina lente (make haste, slowly). In it he discusses how research libraries have enormous opportunities—defense of intellectual freedom, celebration of diversity, advocacy of responsible stewardship, promotion of social responsibility and the social good—to leverage proven models of community building and collective action to advance core professional values.

Holes in the Print Safety Net

November 25, 2018

A recent CRL analysis of three major validated JSTOR print archives found that the combined holdings of those archives are short of comprehensive.

Global Collections Initiative: Mexico City Workshop 2018

September 7, 2018

In June 2018 Latin American specialists and librarians from the U.S., U.K., and Latin America gathered in Mexico City to consider and critique findings from CRL's Global Collections Inititative. This is a report from that meeting.

Libraries and the Global Information Supply Chain

August 16, 2018

The 2018 CRL Global Collections Forum examined the evolving global “supply chain” for source materials for research. The present post summarizes the key ideas, and suggests what the new supply chain means for CRL and its community.  

CRL's Eighth Decade: A Community Perspective

June 12, 2018

At the 2018 Council of Voting Members meeting members weighed in on two broad strategic directions that emerged from Board and management planning.

A Sea Change (9): Investment in Open Access and Shared Digital Resources

March 27, 2018

Proactive investment in Open Data and shared digital resources might serve CRL libraries and researchers worldwide better than continuing to focus resources on amassing physical collections.

A Sea Change (8): Integrating CRL Print in a North American Shared Collections Network

February 13, 2018

Integrating CRL collections in a North America-wide shared collections network.

A Sea Change (7): CRL's Eighth Decade

February 8, 2018

CRL's legacy of sustained, cooperative collection-building prepares it for confronting new challenges in its eighth decade. 

Expanding the Global Resources Network

November 29, 2017

The new Global Collections Initiative is expanding the CRL network of libraries and institutions committed to building and preserving important and endangered resources for area and international studies. 

Sustaining Access to News: What We Learned from eDesiderata 2017

November 11, 2017

The conversations at the 2017 eDesiderata Forum exploded the notion that our longstanding print-based approach to preserving news still applies in the digital era, and suggested new strategies.