CARL provides leadership and fosters collaboration among Canada’s largest research libraries to advance scholarship and higher education.
CARL operates in an international research landscape characterized by digital culture, technological change, and open science initiatives, and as an organization seeks to promote equity, diversity, inclusion, and reconciliation. CARL values collaboration with other organizations nationally and internationally.
Strategic Priorities
1. Advance Open Scholarship
Canada’s research libraries play pivotal roles in the creation, management, discovery, and use of research produced at universities. CARL supports the critical enabling role of libraries in knowledge creation, dissemination, and mobilization, and the extension of open education.
- Foster new knowledge creation and sustainable research dissemination, especially via open access.
- Lead, develop, and deploy library-based research data management initiatives, in coordination and cooperation with all stakeholders in the RDM lifecycle.
- Advance open pedagogy collaborations and the development and use of open educational resources
2. Ensure Enduring Access
Research libraries provide enduring access for students, faculty, and researchers to the world’s information resources. CARL works to ensure long-term access and preservation of knowledge in a dynamic digital environment.
- Facilitate collaborative activities to preserve and ensure long-term access to all forms of research resources with particular focus on Canadian resources.
- Facilitate innovative access and transformative use of unique collections by researchers, students, and the general public.
3. Strengthen Capacity
As changes in research, teaching, and learning continue to accelerate, Canada’s universities require a wider variety of expertise from their research libraries. CARL fosters development of expertise and capacity for new and emerging roles.
- Support leadership and workforce development across the broad spectrum of competencies required for success in contemporary research libraries.
- Encourage research into areas of strategic focus to CARL.
- Advance equity, diversity, and inclusion in research libraries.
- Enable research libraries’ work toward reconciliation, Indigenization, and decolonization, framed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action.
4. Demonstrate Impact
CARL’s culture of assessment within and across Canadian research libraries enables the articulation of their contributions toward higher education and the research enterprise, and facilitates the continuing evolution of assessment capacity and services.
- In collaboration with other higher education bodies, develop new indicators and approaches to demonstrate impact on research, teaching, and learning
- Facilitate, strengthen, and communicate ongoing qualitative and quantitative library assessment on a pan-Canadian basis.
5. Influence Policy
CARL is an essential national voice for the interests of the academic community and its libraries in a balanced approach to copyright and intellectual property, and on other information policy issues such as traditional knowledge, privacy, access to and accessibility of information, open government, open scholarship, and research infrastructure.
- Represent the interests of Canadian research libraries in the information policy arena, especially at the federal level, to achieve broad access to and effective management of Canada’s information assets.
- Strengthen and mobilize national and international relationships and initiatives across and beyond the library and research sectors to advance common policy objectives.
Read the PDF version of our Strategic Directions