The Center for Research Libraries (also known by its acronym, CRL) is a consortium of North American universities, colleges, and independent research libraries. The consortium acquires and preserves traditional and digital resources for research and teaching and makes them available to member institutions through interlibrary loan and electronic delivery. The Center for Research Libraries was founded in 1949, as the Midwest Inter-Library Center (MILC).
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CRL is governed by a Board of Directors made up of library directors from member institutions. Member libraries contribute a percentage of their own collection-development budget to CRL as an annual membership fee.[1] Many libraries are CRL members as a result of their belonging to consortia which are themselves members.
CRL actively digitizes items to be sent on loan and also creates digital collections from its existing physical-format holdings.
CRL houses large collections of newspapers, international doctoral dissertations, government documents and publications, international serials, and Russian monographs.
CRL's holdings are in OCLC's WorldCat. Items are loaned to members at no charge, while non-members are charged for access to the collections.