The Center for Research Libraries

To mitigate the high costs of acquiring, storing, and maintaining extensive physical collections in research libraries, the Center for Research Libraries will partner with the Law Library Microfilm Consortium and the U.S. Agricultural Information Network to build a sustainable and scalable plan for cooperative management of legacy print materials at the local, regional, state, and national levels. The high costs of maintaining physical collections are impeding library investment in new technologies and services, and consuming scarce university resources such as funding, space, and personnel that could be used to improve support for teaching and research. This project will establish a model for cooperative, coordinated management of physical collections by large numbers of libraries.