As the Center for Research Libraries prepares for a leadership transition, we sat down with CRL President Greg Eow to talk about the accomplishments of his tenure and what the CRL community can look forward to in the years ahead.
“What is CRL?” Greg Eow answers this question first and foremost by reaffirming that for seven decades, the Center for Research Libraries has proven to be a successful model for community building, shared infrastructure, and collective collection building among its member research libraries. From its original founding in 1949 by ten member libraries in the Midwestern United States, today CRL is a cooperative of over 200 voting member institutions across the United States and Canada. With the goal of setting up the institution to thrive under future CRL leaders, Eow devoted the five years of his presidential tenure to strengthen CRL’s internal operations and governance structures and position the organization to enter a period of strategic visioning under incoming CRL President Jake Nadal, who assumes the President role on November 18, 2025.
Under Greg’s stewardship, CRL began a three-phase effort to position CRL for its future. Phase 1 (2019–2022), “Strengthening the Core,” focused on capital improvements in the CRL facility to upgrade CRL’s preservation environment, organizational culture, and enhanced organizational capacity for business intelligence and financial reporting; Phase 2 (2023–2024), “Strengthening the Cooperative,” set out to modernize CRL’s governance structures and by-laws and provide support for CRL’s collections programs in line with these governance structures; during Phase 3 (2024–), “Strengthening the Community,” incoming CRL President Jake Nadal will have an opportunity to work with the CRL Board of Directors and the CRL membership to set a strategic vision in line with community priorities.
Phase One: Strengthening the Core (2019–2022)
According to longtime CRL team member, Marie Waltz, Head of Access Initiatives and Collections Care, “It’s been an honor and a privilege to work with Greg Eow during the last five years. He’s had a positive long-term effect on CRL.” Waltz reports that organizational health “is at an all-time high,” and recalls how “five years ago, we had a number of deferred maintenance and capital improvement needs.” Fast-forward to 2024, and “these have been addressed, and the CRL facility provides the preservation environment our collections need.”
In addition to the capital improvements to CRL’s physical spaces, under Eow’s leadership there has been a renewed focus on creating a vibrant organizational culture at CRL, where staff are encouraged to embrace continuous learning and ongoing professional development. Greg’s dedication to bringing people together and inspiring them in their work is a recurring theme in feedback from CRL staff. CRL Electronic Resources Librarian Erin Haddad-Null shares that Greg “has consistently engaged with staff’s responsibilities, goals, and challenges” during his presidential tenure, going above and beyond to support staff, which “has helped make CRL as it is today: notable for its emphasis and support of professional development.” CRL Library Technician McKinley Hudson adds that “Greg’s tenure here at CRL has been tremendous for our culture. He has brought an atmosphere of accountability and responsibility and boosted morale. Greg treats the staff as colleagues, rather than people who report to him.” In line with this feedback, an organizational climate survey conducted in 2023 indicated that CRL is trending positively overall, even in the face of the high degree of transformative change that CRL has undergone over the last few years and the significant challenges posed by Covid-19.
Phase Two: Strengthening the Cooperative (2023–2024)
Phase two of the CRL enhancements, “Strengthening the Cooperative,” launched an initiative to modernize CRL’s governance structures, including CRL’s by-laws, as well as to review and strengthen CRL’s suite of partnerships and programs to align them with CRL’s core collections mission.
Under Greg’s leadership, CRL’s relationships with its partners have been rationalized, broadened and deepened. During his tenure, CRL launched a new shared print partnership together with HathiTrust and the California Digital Library (CDL), which seeks to realize the vision of a shared print collections future in which equity of access is promoted, the scholarly record is enriched, opportunities for research and teaching are increased, and in which the full potential of the three networks and their collective collections are realized through collaborative, well-developed infrastructure. Greg also oversaw a revitalization of CRL’s NERL licensing program, which recently issued an updated model license agreement. Barbara Rockenbach, Stephen F. Gates University Librarian at Yale University, worked closely with Greg Eow in 2022–2023 as the Chair of the NERL Steering Committee. “The committee was charged with determining an effective governance structure for NERL acknowledging the important structural and organizational relationship between CRL and NERL,” Rockenbach explains. “During this work, Greg was focused on a consultative and participatory process to ensure the needs of those invested in NERL were met, while also being mindful of forging a new codified structure for NERL within CRL. For me, the unified licensing team is one of the best outcomes of this work, creating real value for both NERL and CRL members.”
Greg’s values-based leadership of CRL has received recognition from colleagues at all levels of the organization. For former board member Dr. Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Chair in the School of Social Science at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, it was “a tremendous honor to serve on the CRL Board of Directors and to work with Greg Eow in his first years as CRL President. Now as then, I was struck by Greg’s values-based leadership and bold vision that fostered a productive, collaborative, and equitable research community. It’s a testament to Greg’s transformative leadership that CRL is well-positioned to play a critical role in shaping the emerging world of data, archives, and new technologies so that they align with the mission of responsible, evidenced-based research and knowledge production.” Lorelei Tanji, University Librarian at the University of California, Irvine, also a former CRL board member, further testifies to Greg’s inspirational leadership: “Greg worked hard to build and strengthen the CRL staff team, supported the streamlining of policies and procedures, and created a welcoming and supportive environment.” Tanji adds that Greg’s “deep commitment to global collections and qualities as a thought-leader will be missed.”
Phase Three: Strengthening the Community (2024–)
As a testament to Greg’s legacy, CRL is now entering phase three: “Strengthening the Community.” This phase will build on the foundational work of the past several years to launch CRL into strategic visioning, under the leadership of incoming CRL President Jake Nadal, who begins the role on November 18, 2025.
“Leading CRL over the past five years has been the most challenging, as well as the most rewarding, professional role of my career,” Eow reflects as he steps aside. “It has been an honor to serve such an important organization at an important moment in its history, and I am unabashedly optimistic about what the organization achieves in the years ahead building on the foundation we have laid.”
