The Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) provides library services and supports 134 member Illinois public universities, community colleges, private colleges and universities, and special libraries. Through the member libraries, CARLI serves over 930,000 higher education students, faculty and staff, including over 104,000 across the three University of Illinois campuse
s. One in 10 adults in the state of Illinois is eligible for CARLI services. The I-Share integrated library system serves as the online catalog for 86 libraries. I-Share institutions have access to an enormous public access catalog of nearly 38 million items. Students and faculty may use other I-Share libraries as they would their own. In FY 2016, over 336,000 items circulated among the I-Share institutions. The Illinois Library Delivery Service (ILDS) provides 24-hour delivery service between 141 locations to support interlibrary resource sharing in the state of Illinois. Over 2.2 million items were transported in FY 2016 at an average cost of $.28 per item. The Illinois State Library provides grant funding for ILDS, with operational and management support from CARLI. Through the E-Resources program, CARLI contracts with commercial vendors to supply electronic resources to member institutions, and subsidizes the cost of selected e-resources for the benefit of governing members at full and partial levels. CARLI also brokers a broad range of indexing, abstracting, and full text databases at discounted prices, negotiates and licenses, and provides centralized billing. CARLI Digital Collections serves as a repository for digital content created by member libraries, or purchased by CARLI for use by its members. CARLI Digital Collections provides access to myriad special collections, containing over 440,000 items including images, printed and manuscript materials, sound recordings, and the Saskia Art Image and Sanborn Maps of Illinois collections. Through this combined, seamless environment, faculty, staff, students and the public are able to search across institutions and collections, integrating previously disparate and possibly remote special collections. CARLI Collections Management services provide information and events related to collaborative collections development and preservation efforts at member libraries. Through a partnership with the Open Content Alliance, the CARLI Book Digitization Initiative libraries provided libraries the opportunity to have items from their collections digitized at no cost to them. Over 1.5 million pages of material, from member institutions’ collections including books, theses, serials, yearbooks, and pamphlets are now freely available on the Internet Archive. Through CARLI's Continuing Education efforts, staff and members planned and provided over 30 workshops, training events, forums and webinars in FY 2016. All of these events were available to the staffs of all member libraries at no direct cost. The CARLI Office staff provides network, system and database administration; software development; help desk/online problem reporting and resolution; and data analysis and usage statistics that complement and enhance the effectiveness of the array of products and services available to member libraries.
