I write to report that CRL and the North East Research Libraries Consortium (NERL), a nonprofit program operating under the auspices of Yale University, have come to an agreement to relocate NERL operations to CRL.   Under this new arrangement NERL, which licenses major on-line products on behalf of 28 core member academic research libraries and approximately 80 affiliates, will be managed as a cooperative program under the CRL organizational umbrella. 

For the past two years, CRL has been strengthening its own capacity to support licensing and procurement of electronic resources in areas of traditional CRL collecting strength:  news,  historical archives, government records and publications, and statistical information.  In this effort, working closely with NERL and its executive director Joan Emmet, we have been able to obtain favorable terms for the acquisition of a number of major databases for CRL libraries.  We believe that this new working relationship will afford CRL and NERL libraries greater leverage in acquiring key electronic resources, and in shaping the terms of access to those resources. 

This partnership compares in many respects with the arrangements CRL has with the Global Resources and Area Microform projects.  It will preserve a high degree of autonomy and self-governance for NERL, while creating synergies between NERL licensing and CRL’s own Global Resources Forum activities.

I will share more details with you about this new development in my report at the CRL Annual Council of Voting Members meeting on April 19^th.  That meeting will be a web conference.  You can register and view the agenda for the meeting at the CRL meeting site.