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 85 million 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× the annual dues of most members.
- Members can participate in Global Collections Committees which develop projects to guide annual investments of $400,000 of that budget in acquisition, preservation, and access to international materials
- We can also 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.