Overview
What this is: A focused member engagement program that supports on-site research and instructional development using CRL’s physical collections. The program begins with a travel fellowship and includes staff support and public-facing dissemination of outcomes, creating a recurring cycle of research, partnership, and visibility.
Intended outcomes / Steady state: On-site research at CRL becomes a routine option for member faculty, graduate students, and librarians. Member libraries proactively identify projects that can benefit from CRL’s physical holdings. CRL maintains a growing portfolio of concise, reusable case studies that demonstrate how shared stewardship translates into scholarship, teaching materials, and professional practice.
How it relates: Brings together both parts of the value model, by stimulating annual use of the collections through projects that demonstrate the value of preserving these materials. Advances CRL’s values of access and stewardship by ensuring preserved materials are actively used, and community by creating examples of impact and new discovery options.
Problem or opportunity statement
CRL’s physical collections have significant depth, and onsite usage can enable forms of comparative and exploratory research that are difficult to replicate remotely. Yet for many members, geography and travel costs create a practical barrier to intensive on-site use. As a result, institutions invest in shared stewardship but have practical obstacles to getting the benefit from that investment in support of research or instruction. A modest, structured travel fellowship reduces this barrier while creating visible examples of the scholarly and pedagogical value of the shared collection.
Practical Example(s)
Research for Academic Publication
A graduate student is writing their dissertation on emerging market economies. They find CRL’s collections of foreign bank reports and after requesting a few copies via digital delivery, decide they need to conduct intensive comparative work with the materials. They receive a research fellowship award to spend 3 days onsite at CRL, and in consulting with staff, learn about the Foreign Official Gazettes and are able to bring this additional information into their research. They provide a short article on their work that is published in the CRL newsletter and shared with relevant scholarly society listservs, and they mention CRL in a conference presentation, building awareness among members and users.
Creating a Meta Collection
A faculty member at a university with an e-preferred policy is interested in incorporating history of printing into one of their courses. They connect with a librarian who asks CRL if they can help with materials. CRL has relevant content—from early printed books to printing trade journals—but they are not cataloged in a way that foregrounds this use. The librarian receives a research fellowship to spend a week onsite working with CRL staff and volunteers from the Caxton Club to create several model collections and a printing history research guide for the CRL collections. Through this work, CRL staff identify metadata enhancement opportunities that improve discovery for all members.
Implementation and Development
Implementation Requirements
Program requires modest cash funding (anticipated in the low tens of thousands annually) and primarily leverages existing CRL services and staff expertise.
CRL will need to establish a consistent and ideally straightforward process for payment or reimbursement of recipients. Programs like this already exist among several members libraries, so modeling process on those may be wise.
Development Process
Develop a timeline for announcing the program, reviewing proposals, and making awards. This is likely to be constrained by the academic calendar.
Decide on the outcome sought: articles for newsletters, research guides, etc.
Establish simple criteria for evaluating outcomes (e.g., publication, instructional use, research guide creation, discovery improvements) to inform continuation or expansion.
Awards would be limited in number during the pilot phase to ensure high-touch staff support and manageable administrative overhead.
Governance and Oversight
Determine whether selection will be staff-led with periodic review by a small advisory group of members, or directly reviewed by member representatives.
Initial scope will focus exclusively on projects requiring in-person engagement with CRL’s physical holdings. Expansion to digital or international support would require separate review and member endorsement.