Center for Research Libraries

 The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is an international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries. Founded in 1949, CRL supports advanced research and teaching in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences by preserving and making available to scholars the primary source material critical to those disciplines.

CRL acquires and preserves newspapers, journals, documents, archives, and other traditional and digital resources from a global network of sources. Most materials acquired are from outside the United States, and many are from five “emerging” regions of the world: Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Latin America.

CRL enables institutions to provide students, faculty, and other researchers liberal access to these rich source materials through interlibrary loan and electronic delivery. CRL loan and electronic delivery are designed to support major research projects, such as the production of scholarly monographs and studies, the writing of dissertations, and seminars at the graduate and advanced undergraduate levels.

Librarians, specialists, and scholars at CRL libraries participate in building this shared CRL collection of research materials through the purchase proposal and demand purchase programs. Participation in these programs and in CRL collection webinars and other Global Resources Forum events enables librarians to benefit from the enormous pool of collection-related expertise and knowledge available in the CRL community. Collection specialists at major U.S. and Canadian research institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Chicago, the University of California, McGill University, and the University of Toronto participate in these CRL programs.

CRL is based in Chicago and governed by a Board of Directors drawn from the research and higher education communities.