The approximately five million newspapers, journals, books, pamphlets, dissertations, archives, government publications, and other resources held by CRL support original research and teaching. CRL holdings include materials from all world regions: Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Central, South and Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe. While these shared collections are largely paper and microform, CRL provides online access to a continually expanding body of digital materials.

CRL Collecting Areas

CRL acquires and makes available to researchers a wide range of uncommon materials. Acquisitions focus on news; law and government; finance, the history of science, technology and engineering; and the history and economics of agriculture.

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Cooperative Collection Building

Longstanding cooperative programs strategically build deep and diverse shared collections of source materials, available to researchers at CRL libraries, while minimizing local acquisition, processing and storage costs.

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Tools and Resources for Informed Collection Development

CRL supports informed investment in collections by libraries in its community, through a variety of information resources, analyses, activities, and forums.

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The Impact of CRL

Stories illustrating CRL’s impact on research, teaching, collection building and preservation.

Vietnamese Newspapers Essential for Berkeley Dissertation

UC Berkeley graduate student uses CRL’s extensive collection of South Vietnamese newspapers for his dissertation on the social history of the interregnum period, 1963-1967..

Helping Libraries Deal with ‘Big’ Data

At CRL’s 2018 Global Collections Forum, Julie Sweetkind-Singer, Head of Branner Earth Sciences Library and Map Collections at Stanford University Libraries, discussed how satellite imagery and large geospatial datasets are being used as source materials for scholars in a variety of disciplines, and the new types of library support they require.

Unique Arab Diaspora Materials Saved for Future Scholars

The Middle East Materials Project (MEMP) microfilmed Arab-language publications from several diaspora communities in non-Arab countries, continuing to affirm MEMP’s role as a provider of rare and distinctive documentation.