On April 14, 2016, I attended the Center for Research Libraries’ (CRL) Council of Voting Members Meeting in Chicago. This post is a short summary of the meeting.

Scott Waugh (UCLA, Chair of the CRL Board of Directors) began the meeting by briefly highlighting some potential areas of focus for CRL in the future: digitization of document delivery, an enhanced online presence, expanded global partnerships, expanded membership, improved services to members, and efficiencies to reduce costs.

Next, Thomas Burish (Notre Dame, CRL Secretary) provided CRL’s Secretary Report. He started by explaining that most of CRL’s funding comes through membership fees. Growth in membership has been challenged in recent years by the economy (and resultant library budget cuts). Also, some libraries have analyzed return-on-investment and concluded that the benefits of CRL membership do not justify the costs. There are 219 members of CRL, but eight members have notified CRL that they will not be renewing their memberships. CRL is working hard to recruit new members. Prospective areas for growth are land grant institutions, mid-sized private universities, and elite four year schools. CRL has marketing activities planned for the coming year.

Bernie O’Reilly (CRL President) then gave the President’s Report. CRL is celebrating the tenth anniversary of its Technical Reports Archive and Image Library (TRAIL), which digitizes engineering technical reports. This initiative has become one of HathiTrust’s top 25 contributors. TRAIL is one of several initiatives that are working under the CRL umbrella. Others include an effort to preserve Afghan publications, the CRL Latin Americanist Group’s preservation of El Diario de Juarez, and the South Asian Open Archives Initiative. O’Reilly stated that the top requestors of CRL physical collections are Harvard, Michigan, Notre Dame, Chicago, and Minnesota. The number of requests they are getting for loans is steadily declining, but the number of items they are lending is growing; O’Reilly said that this suggests that more researchers are taking advantage of online access to CRL collections. The top users of CRL online collections include Texas A&M, Penn State, Florida State, Hong Kong, and the Max Planck Institute. Once a CRL document is digitized, it is made accessible to all CRL institutions. Over seven million pages from CRL’s collection have been scanned to date. O’Reilly noted trends in use: there is growing interest in mining the literature of troubled parts of Asia and the Middle East, particularly materials related to religion, law, the courts, and civil society. Beyond scanning materials based on requests, CRL is also engaging in the strategic digitization of certain materials. In particular, they are digitizing international government documents that they anticipate may be repressed after a new regime takes power. CRL has identified the most corrupt nations based on the ratings of the organization Transparency International and then concentrated on the digitization of these countries’ materials. These materials will be made freely accessible online.

O’Reilly stated that another area of focus for CRL is the licensing of databases. Licensing of databases is a fairly new initiative. This year they offered 54 databases for purchase through them, an increase from the 30 they offered last year. CRL is interested in licensing databases not just to be a “buying club” but to use its large membership to gain leverage on use rights like data mining and also to ensure that vendors disclose the full contents of their databases. They are trying to focus on a niche of databases focusing on news and data concerning censuses, geospatial, and business. Vendors of these databases do not always consider libraries as their primary customers and so libraries have struggled to get leverage in negotiations with these vendors. CRL is trying to change this.

O’Reilly concluded with what he termed as three big questions:

1. Is our digital investment paying off? The amount of content CRL digitizes pales in comparison to other efforts such as Google Books and HathiTrust. However, the content that they digitize is more unique. They are involved in discussions with HathiTrust to collaborate to assess relative strengths and weaknesses and pursue a strategic alignment.
2. Should more CRL resources be OA? O’Reilly noted the potential for a “free rider problem” in which non-members could benefit from CRL-digitized content without subsidizing CRL’s digitization efforts. There are currently 219 members, but about 700 institutions in the United States and Canada fit the profile of a CRL member. O’Reilly further noted that some materials that they digitize are not in the public domain and therefore could not be made openly accessible. This question inspired a number comments from the attendees, with strong consensus that increasing access to knowledge is a core value of librarianship and, to the extent possible, CRL should attempt to make its resources openly accessible. Although the result may be some “free riding,” the ability to steer the direction of CRL and the materials that it digitizes would remain a major benefit that only members would enjoy.
3. Should CRL merge selected serials titles with related holdings at the Linda Hall Library? See this page for details: https://www.crl.edu/blogs/combining-and-improving-print-assets. According to O’Reilly, this was a “no-brainer” but, since decisions about CRL collections are up to the membership, they will pursue an e-referendum to discuss this issue.

Xuemao Wang (University of Cincinnati) provided the Treasurer’s Report. He reported that in FY15 there was a deficit in CRL’s accounts of about $377,000 and a projected deficit of about $500,000 in FY16. A deficit in FY17 is also projected. However, all of these deficits are due to a deliberate decision by CRL to draw on their significant reserve funds to build their investments in the key areas of digitization, database licensing, and collection analysis. They do not expect to be in a deficit beginning in fiscal years 2020 and 2021, when they plan to begin growing their reserve funds again.