The Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC) was founded as a joint initiative of eight members of the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area to coordinate access and increase the scope of resources of each university's main library.
To facilitate this, the WRLC endeavors to achieve three goals:
To this end, WRLC has created ALADIN, an electronic database of scholarly journals and periodicals as well as a digitized, collective university library catalog. It also called for the establishment of a Digital Collections production Center, which provides digital conversion services and is funded by the federal National Leadership Grants for Libraries program.
This establishes protocols for development by providing resource-sharing policies and a shared virtual reference.
This was designed to free valuable shelf-space at the member universities for newer or more frequently accessed volumes. The resulting facility consists of 12 rows of 30-foot (9.1 m) high racks containing approximately 9,900 shelves in a controlled and secured building.