Chicago, IL, and Oslo, Norway – 14 November 2025. The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) has launched its new Print Archives Preservation Registry (PAPR) on the TIND ILS platform, completing the second of three TIND systems now in production at CRL. The new PAPR serves as a modern, hosted data lake, replacing CRL’s locally built infrastructure with a scalable environment for aggregating and analyzing collective print holdings and bibliographic data contributed by more than 200 member libraries.
Photo: Center for Research Libraries
Originally developed in 2012 with support from the California Digital Library and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, PAPR was designed to help libraries track and coordinate commitments to preserve print serials and journals. The upgraded PAPR registry now provides a powerful, sustainable foundation for shared-print programs, enabling libraries to compare holdings, identify overlaps, share commitments, and make data-driven decisions about long-term shared-print retention and stewardship.
“We’re thrilled to work with TIND,” said CRL leadership. “TIND’s robust infrastructure, powerful search functionality, and efficient workflows will improve the user experience and enhance operational efficiency. Additionally, TIND’s ongoing development ensures PAPR remains a vital resource for print collections.”
PAPR functions as both a registry and an analytics platform—allowing libraries to ingest, link, and report on records using TIND’s flexible workflows, APIs, and visualization tools. CRL also provides members with free, on-demand collection-comparison reports that assess overlap with other institutions, supporting strategic retention, deduplication, and preservation planning.
To support this complex data environment, TIND developed several new capabilities for CRL, including a linking framework that unites bibliographic and holdings records to ensure real-time data integrity, a configurable table view optimized for managing very large datasets, and custom tokenizers that enhance indexing and search precision across heterogeneous metadata.
These innovations effectively merge bibliographic and holdings data into a single searchable index—reducing reconciliation work, improving discovery, and modeling a next-generation shared-print workflow now available to other institutions on the TIND platform.
CRL now operates three TIND systems - TIND ILS for PAPR, a second TIND ILS instance for internal library services, and TIND Digital Archive for its digital collections - creating a unified ecosystem for preservation, access, and collaboration.
Explore PAPR at https://papr.crl.edu
About the Center for Research Libraries
The Center for Research Libraries is an international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries. Founded in 1949, CRL's mission is to preserve and provide access to unique and rare research materials not widely held by individual libraries. With a diverse collection of resources covering a broad range of subjects, CRL fosters collaboration and promotes global access to scholarly materials.
About TIND
TIND is an official CERN spin-off providing commercial library management systems, digital preservation, and research data management solutions based on CERN open-source software. Serving academic, public, and special research libraries around the globe, TIND is headquartered in Oslo, Norway. More info at www.tind.io
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