Categories: CARLI
      Date: Dec  2, 2008
     Title: Center for Research Libraries (CRL) Membership Subsidy

At its September meeting, the CARLI Board approved a partial subsidy for CARLI libraries interested in becoming members of CRL. CARLI will subsidize 50% of the annual membership fee up to a maximum of $2,000/year for a total of 2 years. The cost of CRL membership is based on the library’s annual materials expenditure.

What is CRL?

The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is a consortium of 240-plus university, college, and independent research libraries that acquires and preserves newspapers, journals, documents, archives, and other traditional and digital resources from a global network of sources.  and makes them available to both member institutions and non-members through interlibrary loan and electronic delivery.  

Through CRL member libraries have access to more than 4.5 million publications, archives, and collections and one million digital resources to supplement their own humanities, science, and social science holdings.

At present CRL is digitizing 3,000 - 4,000 pages of material daily, and more than two thirds of that output is dedicated to on demand scans in response to patron ILL requests. Digitized files are retained on the server and accessible by users at all CRL member institutions. In 2007, 92 percent of CRL’s interlibrary loan requests were sent by two-day express within one business day, and 97 percent of copies were delivered within one day.

CRL resources include:

• Largest collection of circulating newspapers in North America.
• More than 38,000 foreign journals that are rarely held in U.S. libraries.
• More than 800,000 foreign dissertations—mostly from European institutions.
• Area Studies - Major microform and paper collections from Africa, Latin America, Middle East, Europe, Asia, Southeast Asia, and more.

Voting member benefits include the following:

• Participation in the Purchase Proposal Program
• Participation in the Shared Purchase Program
• Participation in the Demand Purchase Program
• Electronic delivery of articles and monographs (when possible)
• Eligible to load CRL catalog records or subsets at no charge
• Program and service orientations available for member staff.
• Individualized resource searches available through CRL’s User Services Liaison.
• Web consultations to optimize user access to the CRL catalog.
• Free subscription to The Charleston Advisor
• Eligible to participate in JSTOR, ICON, Print Archiving, other CRL activities and partnerships.
  
  If you’re interested in receiving a quote on the cost of membership, e-mail support@carli.illinois.edu . For more information, visit the CRL website.