On April 20-21, CRL held its 73rd Annual Council of Voting Members Meeting. The meeting was noteworthy for being CRL’s first hybrid annual meeting, with a welcome return of (limited) in-person attendance alongside virtual attendees.
In his report on the state of the consortium, CRL President Greg Eow identified CRL as “a place, a collective collection, and a community” and “a vital part of the academy-owned, academy-governed infrastructure.” He underscored CRL’s values and first principles, including a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusivity, responsible stewardship of analog collections in a digital age, and fostering a more equitable global academic publishing landscape. To achieve these ends, CRL has strengthened its core operations and looks forward to further refining its mission and strategic vision as well as recalibrating its services and partnerships in the year ahead.
Collections and Services Policy Committee Chair Elizabeth Kirk and Vice-Chair Denise Pan talked about recent activities of the committee, which has brought new ideas, energy, and community engagement to our community. They launched a new Sustainable Stewardship and Access Group, and issued a call for participation. They also conducted a real-time poll of participants in order to gauge the community’s enthusiasm for different CRL services and activities. In response to the question of whether CRL should invest in open knowledge/ open infrastructure, the majority of voting members indicated that they would support CRL in such efforts.
International Collections and Content Group Chair Brian Vivier summarized the committee’s efforts around their Call-to-Action survey, which had noted the importance of equity, open access, and post-custodial and non-extractive collecting to Area Studies librarianship, as well as the Values Framework for Open Access Initiatives. That framework had led to the pilot “Opening the Future: Central European University Press (CEUP).” Committee member Lidia Uziel spoke in more detail about this effort, launched in partnership with COPIM, to increase open access monographs.
At the Board of Directors meeting held the previous day, outgoing Board of Directors Chair Deborah Jakubs reflected on “The Global Dimensions of Scholarship and Research Libraries Finding Synergies, Creating Convergence,” which she had co-authored a decade before. In thinking about its continued relevance, Jakubs remarked on how the report sagaciously pointed out that “understanding the global is often based on knowledge of the local.” Offering this as a frame, Jakubs noted that CRL has a potential role in serving as a convenor for collective actions and for building collaborations to address ongoing needs for collective collections and cataloging, to meet challenges that are both local and shared. At the conclusion of the Annual CRL Council of Voting Members meeting, which marked her last as Chair, Jakubs thanked current CRL leadership for the work done to lay the foundation for the bright future for our community.
The 73rd CRL Council of Voting Members meeting preceded the kickoff event in CRL’s “Diversity as Knowledge” Series, which launched with a keynote address by Dr. Reggie Raju of the University of Cape Town. Dr. Raju’s talk, “Expunging Bias: Re-Engineering the Knowledge Ecosystem,” serves as the first installment of a series of virtual gatherings on the theme of “Diversity as Knowledge,” which will conclude at the in-person 2023 CRL Annual Meeting in Chicago in April 2023. The series, as conceived by the International Content and Collections Group (ICCG), will explore “how centering diversity, inclusivity, and equity in research libraries has implications for enriching sources for knowing, the ways of knowing, and the quality of knowledge production itself.”
In the governance portion of the CRL meeting, the 2022-23 officers elected by the Board of Directors were announced:
Chair Adriene Lim, University of Maryland
Vice-Chair Denise Stephens, University of Oklahoma
Treasurer Roger Schonfeld, Ithaka S+R Libraries
Secretary Lorelei Tanjei, University of California at Irvine
The following candidates were elected to three-year terms for the Board of Directors:
First term:
Larry Alford, Chief Librarian, University of Toronto Libraries
Frederick Barnhart, Dean, Northern Illinois University Libraries
John Culshaw, University Librarian, University of Iowa
Angi Faiks, Library Director, Macalester College
Matthew Sheehy, University Librarian, Brandeis University
Second term:
Dale Askey, Vice-Provost (Library and Museums) & Chief Librarian, University of Alberta Edmonton
Adriene Lim, Dean of Libraries, University of Maryland
Denise Stephens, Peggy V. Helmerich Dean of University Libraries, University of Oklahoma
CRL thanks everyone who attended and participated in this year’s annual meeting. Materials from the 2022 Annual Council of Voting Members Meeting can be found here.
