CARL is a federally incorporated not-for-profit corporation and registered charity operating in Canada, with its head office located in Ottawa, Ontario. Its fundamental governing documents are comprised of the following:
- Canada Not-for-Profit Corporations Act (S.C. 2009, c. 23) The Canada Not-for-Profit Corporations Act (S.C. 2009, c. 23) and its Regulations provide many of the rules of operation of CARL as a federally-incorporated not-for-profit corporation.
- Articles of Continuance CARL’s Articles of Continuance under the Canada Not-for-Profit Corporations Act (S.C. 2009, c. 23) received certification on June 14, 2013.
- By-Law No. 1 Except as already set out in the Act or the Articles, CARL is governed by the provisions of its general operating By-Law No. 1.
Board of Directors
The Board of Directors is the chief governance body of CARL, responsible to the membership at large, and with formal legal responsibility for the organization. All other CARL committees are formally advisory to the Board.
The elected members of the CARL Board of Directors are all directors of member libraries. The Vice-President automatically becomes President at the end of the current President’s two-year term. Regional representatives are formally elected by all CARL members. New terms normally commence at the end of the spring annual general meeting.
The President and the Executive Director are the spokespersons for the Association of first resort. The Executive Director manages the operations of the Association and reports to the Board.
Board Members
Contact information for board members can be found within our Directory of Members.
Brett Waytuck – President
Dean, University Libraries and Archives
University of Regina
Regina, Saskatchewan, Term: 2023-2025
Dr. Mary-Jo Romaniuk – Vice-President
Vice-Provost for Libraries and Cultural Resources and University Librarian
University of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta, Term: 2023-2025
Michael Vandenburg – Treasurer
(Atlantic Region Representative)
Dean of Libraries
Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Term: 2023-2025
Stéphanie Gagnon – Secretary
(Quebec Region Representative)
Directrice générale des bibliothèques
Université de Montréal
Montréal, Quebec, Term: 2023-2025
Talia Chung – Director
(Ontario Region Representative)
University Librarian and Dean of Libraries
University of Ottawa
Ottawa, Ontario, Term: 2024-2026
Jonathan Bengtson – Director
(Western Region Representative)
University Librarian
University of Victoria
Victoria, British Columbia, Term: 2024-2026
Standing Committee on Finance and Audit
An advisory committee to the Board, the Standing Committee on Finance and Audit assists the Board in fulfilling its oversight responsibilities for the financial affairs of the Association and to ensure the establishment of sound financial policies and practices that will lead to the long-term financial sustainability of the Association. The CARL Treasurer chairs this committee, and membership consists of two members of the CARL Board (currently the CARL President and Vice-President), and a senior administrator with a CA designation at a member institution. This position is currently held by Jeff Lennon, Assistant Vice-President, Planning & Budget (University of Toronto). The Executive Director is a permanent member of the committee and the Administrative Officer and Event Coordinator is the Secretary.
Guiding Principles
CARL members adhere as a closely as possible to several key principles:
The Hamilton Declaration
(adopted by the membership, November 9, 1993; augmented, June 12, 1995)
- Access to Information: The Association supports and promotes the right of all individuals to have access to all expressions of knowledge, creativity and intellectual activity.
- Creating Knowledgeable Information Users: The Association believes researchers and students should have the necessary skills to be independent information seekers and users.
- Research Libraries — A Strategic National Resource: The Association recognizes the collective human and material resources of its members as constituting a strategic national information resource.
- Resource Sharing: The Association endorses the sharing of resources among its members as an activity essential to providing access to information required by the scholarly community.
- Scholarly Communication: The Association has a fundamental role in facilitating and enhancing the process of scholarly communication.
- For greater certainty: It is the position of the Association that withdrawal of material from the collection of any of its member libraries on the basis of content is an extremely serious matter, clearly having the potential of contravening the CARL Policy Statement on Freedom of Expression.
Freedom of Expression
See CARL’s Freedom of Expression and Inclusive Libraries (April 2022)
Archived Statement
(adopted by the CARL membership, ca. 1987)
All persons in Canada have a fundamental right, as embodied in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Bill of Rights, to have access to all expressions of knowledge, creativity and intellectual activity.
It is the responsibility of research libraries to facilitate access to all expressions of knowledge, opinion, intellectual activity and creativity from all periods of history to the current era including those which some may consider unconventional, unpopular, unorthodox or unacceptable.
To this end research libraries shall acquire and make available, through purchase or resource sharing, the widest variety of materials that support the scholarly pursuits of their communities.
Open Access
CARL is committed to the principle of open access as a means of broadening access to scholarly materials. The Association has signed two important international declarations on open access.
Budapest Open Access Initiative (re-endorsed by the CARL membership, November 13, 2009)
Berlin Declaration (endorsed by the CARL Board of Directors; signed July 18, 2011)
Non-Disclosure Clauses
(as adopted by the CARL Board of Directors, January 28, 2010)
The Canadian Association of Research Libraries strongly encourages its member libraries and their licensing consortia to avoid signing license agreements with content vendors that contain non-disclosure clauses.
It is to the advantage of the research library community to be able to share information among its members on the terms negotiated with vendors, especially about pricing. The sharing of such information helps to create fair and transparent market conditions for future negotiations. As research libraries respect the confidentiality that they agree to in such licenses, it is important that they not consent to the inclusion non-disclosure clauses when signing a license agreement with a vendor.
Interlibrary Loan Fee Suspension
The CARL Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Fee Suspension Trial between members of CARL libraries came into effect January 1, 1992. During the trial, CARL libraries agreed not to charge each other transaction fees for the loan of monographs and they submitted to the CARL Trial Coordinator annual statistics for monographs loaned and photocopies sent to other CARL libraries. For these statistics, transactions, rather than items, were counted, e.g., four volumes of one work sent at one time is one transaction; a photocopy of one article from one journal is one transaction. This trial covered fees for the loan of monographs and any administration or other fees for photocopies (but not per-page charges). Fees for ILL photocopies and document delivery (“non-returnables”) were charged unless covered by some other regional agreement.
The trial fee suspension remained in effect although the collection of the annual statistics was discontinued in 1997.
Subsequently, a resource sharing agreement amongst Canadian regional consortia was formalized in 2007. As of February 1, 2016 this agreement states that the Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL), the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), the Council of Atlantic University Libraries / Conseil de Bibliothèques Universitaires de L’Atlantique (CAUL-CBUA), and the Bureau de coopération interuniversitaire (BCI), agree to extend reciprocal interlibrary loan / document delivery privileges in Canadian universities at a cost of $5.00 per article (no charge for returnables), in the interest of developing Canadian resource sharing and promoting common standards. As a basic principle, all parties agree to exhaust local resource sharing opportunities before borrowing from each other.
Library Staff Exchanges
CARL recognizes the importance of effective cooperative endeavours among its member libraries. It also recognizes that the experience of performing similar activities within a different work environment constitutes a means of professional development that can be beneficial to both the employee and the academic/research institution. For these reasons, the directors of CARL libraries wish to encourage and facilitate staff exchanges between member libraries.
CARL Governance Documents
