Charting the Course: A Forum on Collective Action Strategy

Amy Wood, CRL’s Director of Discovery & Technology, opened the session “Charting the Course: A Forum on Collective Action Strategy” at the 2025 CRL Annual Meeting (Chicago, IL, May 20–21), with the following presentation.

Over the past 76 years, CRL has been a strategic partner, steady leader, and reliable support system—helping our members and the broader scholarly ecosystem address some of the most enduring and complex challenges facing our profession.

The table below represents a number of shared challenges and moments when CRL stepped in with infrastructure, coordination of effort, and long-term engagement. When collections ballooned beyond what individual institutions could sustain, CRL helped build shared stewardship models.

When budgets strained under the weight of expensive resources, CRL undertook a variety of acquisitions and licensing programs to relieve the pressure. When the digital shift upended access and preservation, CRL responded with digitization-on-demand services, custom holdings registries and tools to support collective decision-making.

CRL’s work is often so consistent—and so infrastructure or network-oriented—that it can fade into the background. But it is that very consistency that has made CRL essential. It is what keeps the research ecosystem resilient, adaptable, and more equitable across our membership.

Let’s focus for a moment on one recurring theme: the conundrum of redundant collection growth across our library system, and the corresponding risk of losing parts of the scholarly record. These two challenges go hand in hand and are an enduring dynamic that we will continuously navigate rather than solve. They reflect a structural reality of our work that shifts with changing conditions and requires thoughtful, collaborative response—not just once, but again and again.

I would like to share examples of intentional collaborations that together demonstrate a consistent thread in CRL’s efforts to address these dual challenges.  From the 1960s to 2000, CRL partnered with NYPL and the Library of Congress, to preserve full runs of 650 non-US Official Gazettes. CRL not only became the steward of much of that shared physical collection but also created and maintained a registry of distributed holdings among a half dozen other libraries to expand the reach of the initiative. As that effort was winding down, or changing focus, the challenge of stewarding print serials was growing to crisis levels in the late 1990s, CRL responded again by first holding a conference to chart, with its members and other stakeholders, a strategic and shared course of action and then, secondly, by taking ownership of key aspects of that strategy. We took on a issue-level validated JSTOR archive to reduce the print burden of each of our members. In 2009, we were among the inaugural group that founded the Print Archives Network (PAN) forum, a twice-yearly venue to share best practices, information and ideas among shared print stakeholders, and CRL has provided financial support for the PAN forum ever since. We built registries for serials and newspaper holdings, offered cross-institutional collection analysis services, we built partnerships with libraries of record, such as Linda Hall, and undertook grant-funded initiatives to test bold ideas and to report on the status of our collective work. These efforts have been continuously maintained since that strategy-developing conference in 2003.

And yet, I have heard colleagues ask, “What is CRL doing in shared print?”, or fail to include CRL’s holdings in their deaccessioning projects or consortial collection analyses. These oversights are not intentional or the result of disregard—they are just examples of what happens when infrastructure becomes so reliable, we stop seeing it. When collective action addresses only the urgent rather than enduring.

That is why your voice, your engagement, your presence, right now matters to reinvigorate how we address enduring challenges.

CRL’s value doesn’t come from reacting to the urgent, although we can do that. It comes from anticipating the important—holding space for long-term solutions that no one institution could tackle alone. In a profession constantly chasing the next big thing, CRL reminds us that maintenance is a form of innovation—especially when it is done together, with care, and intention.

What could CRL take on—strategically, operationally, collaboratively—that would unlock capacity, opportunity, or transformation at your library?

Watch the full "Charting the Course" strategy forum on CRL's YouTube channel, including contributions from Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (University of Illinois), Jason Baumann (New York Public Library), and Jennifer Osorio (UCLA)