CRL Fundamentals

Fundamentals of CRL

CRL is a reliable and efficient stewardship organization. We make the costs of the collective collection truly collective, so members can focus on local priorities.

  • Our preservation facility keeps 6 million items ready for use at a yearly cost of about 25¢ each, with more optimizations planned and space available for the future.
  • We preserve access to at-risk materials by reformatting thousands of pages each year, more than 85million pages to date.

CRL is cooperative collection development. Member-led committees shape our collection policies and guide our decisions about access and acquisitions.

  • We invest over $1 million each year in shared acquisitions and open access digitization, roughly 15–30 times the annual dues of most members.
  • Members can participate in Global Collections Committees which develop projects to guide annual investments of $400,000iii of that budget in acquisition, preservation, and access to international materials.
  • We can coordinate shared purchases and donated collections that strengthen the collective collection.

CRL is e-resource licensing. We negotiate fair, transparent, and sustainable licenses that support access, preservation, and open models.

  • Our licensing portfolio includes over 2,300 resources across a wide range of disciplines including the humanities, STEM, and social sciences.
  • Negotiating teams regularly secure discounts of 20–50% off list price with some of the lowest annual cost increases in the industry.
  • Participation and transaction fees for CRL licensing are among the lowest available.

CRL is unique content in the hands of your users. Every day we send out materials from a collection built by and for our member libraries, in hundreds of languages and subjects.

  • Each month, we fulfill over 500 on-demand digitization requests or physical loans and serve over 30,000 open-access digital items to users around the world.
  • We support discovery with custom record loading, topic guides, and staff consultations for reference or instruction.

CRL is support for your strategic goals. As a collecting institution in the same business as our members, we are uniquely able to convert challenges into sustainable solutions.

  • We offer collection analysis services for members at no additional cost, derived from our extensive experience with shared print (including the JSTOR archive).
  • CRL can help with retrospective conversion and metadata enhancement, and we are prototyping shared cataloging to make backlogged resources available.
  • We are taking practical steps to bring AI into our work and validate the outcomes, to cost-effectively scale our capacity and give our members a meaningful case study.