CARLI serves over 90% of Illinois higher education students, faculty and staff at 129 member institutions, which include Illinois public universities, private colleges and universities, community colleges, and research libraries, such as the Newberry Library, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, the Chicago History Museum, and the Field Museum of Natural History. Among the benefits of CARLI membership are the I-Share integrated catalog and resource sharing system that serves 89 institutions; the Illinois Library Delivery Service (ILDS), offering 24-hour delivery among 142 libraries and library systems; and E-resources brokering, with over 2700 discounted subscriptions to electronic journals and other resources at 123 participating Illinois libraries in 2020.
Electronic resources available to CARLI members also include EBSCO Academic Search Complete, electronic full-text journals available to the students and faculty at all member institutions; CARLI Digital Collections, which hosts digital collections containing over 2.4 TB of data comprising images, printed and manuscript materials, sound recordings, and the Saskia Art Images and Sanborn Maps of Illinois collections, including objects created by CARLI libraries; and over 1.3 million pages digitized through a partnership with the Internet Archive/Open Content Alliance.