The programme is designed to provide House Libraries (especially but not exclusively those lacking resources) with books, periodicals, reports and other reference material they do not have. Well‑resourced Libraries throughout the Commonwealth parliamentary community regularly cull recent material from their shelves, but lack both the budgets to ship this material to other Parliamentary and Legislative Libraries and the contacts throughout the Commonwealth to know where particular reference sources are needed.
PIRC must obtain from Commonwealth Parliamentary and Legislative Libraries lists of material, which they no longer require but which could still be useful to other House Libraries. A master list of all available titles is then circulated to all Commonwealth Parliamentary and Legislative Libraries, which indicate, in order of preference, those titles they would like to add to their stocks of reference sources available to Members.
PIRC allocates titles to requesting Libraries, informs the donor Libraries of the recipients of their available stocks and arranges for the donor Libraries to be reimbursed by the CPA Secretariat for the postage costs. Postage is by the most economic surface mail available within regions, or the most economic airmail if transfers are between different regions.