The Consortium of European Research Libraries is a membership organisation for all libraries, museums of the book, archives and other organisations with an interest in cultural heritage in the form of early printed books and manuscripts. Our Strategic Plan is available here.

Collaboration
Together we develop resources that increase the visibility and use of our collections, thereby supporting students, scholars, researchers, archivists, special collections librarians, information professionals and cataloguers in their work.

Cultural heritage
We bring together under one umbrella descriptions of books, biographical information about printers, information about book production (such as printers’ marks, book bindings, size of print runs and watermarks), and extensive information about book ownership (such as owners’ marks, stamps on bindings and and library stamps). In this way our collections are placed in a wider context, allowing us to shine a bright light on our shared European cultural heritage.

Digital humanities
Many of CERL’s databases linked to digital copies of original materials held in our libraries. Our search interfaces are especially tailored to the specialist data we hold, allowing for detailed searching and granular retrieval results. Our CERL Thesaurus is published as Linked Open Data, and may be reused both to build connections between databases and to facilitate searching in large data sets.

A Network for Sharing Expertise
In our network we discuss and develop standards (e.g. for describing provenance information and bookbinding), we support institutions in protecting their collections against theft and criminal damage, and we support the exchange of expertise (e.g. the Expert Group for Manuscript Librarians and the LIBER Working Group for Digital Humanities and Digital Cultural Heritage). We also promote the exchange of knowledge through our website, seminars, the CERL Newsletter and conference proceedings.

For an overview of CERL services and activities see, Ingeborg Versprille, Marian Lefferts and Cristina Dondi, 'The Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL): twenty years of promoting Europe's cultural heritage in print and manuscript', in 027.7 Zeitschrift für Bibliothekskultur, 2,1 (2014): Konsortien & Konsorten, pp. 30-40. Online journal of the University of Basel, Switzerland, ISSN 2296-0597. http://www.0277.ch/ojs/index.php/cdrs_0277/article/view/50/135

Joining CERL as a member
There is information about the Benefits of Membership, the types of membership, the legal framework governing CERL membership and a list of other CERL members available on this site. But of course, you can also contact secretariat@cerl.org for further information.