Collecting Areas [1]
CRL actively collects in the following areas:
Serials
Current subscriptions include 7,000 titles, rarely held in North American libraries, including the following categories:
- Foreign-language science and technology periodicals, including titles from the Russian Academy of Sciences
- South Asian serials acquired through the Library of Congress South Asia Cooperative Acquisitions Program (SACAP) [2]
- Southeast Asian serials acquired through the Library of Congress Cooperative Acquisitions Program for Southeast Asia (CAP-SEA) [3]
Newspapers
CRL holds approximately 10,000 titles from countries in all world regions, and from every state in the U.S., including more than 1,800 U.S. ethnic and African American papers. We currently subscribe to more than 300 newspapers from 96 countries and to 36 U.S. ethnic press papers [4].
CRL also microfilms current issues of selected foreign newspapers [5] on an ongoing basis, and the back files of important foreign newspapers identified through collaborative programs like the Area Materials Projects [6] and the International Coalition on Newspapers (ICON) [7].
Monographs
CRL holds more than 500,000 monographs in all formats. Ongoing acquisitions include:
- Sets in literature, art, theater, music, science, and other fields, which now number over 300 in CRL’s collection, as approved by the membership through the purchase proposal program [8] and the shared purchase program [9]
- Continuing major microform sets, such as the OmniSys World Literature (OWL) Collection [10]
- South Asian and Southeast Asian research titles reformatted to microfiche by the LC Field Offices in New Delhi and Jakarta as part of the Library of Congress Cooperative Acquisitions Programs [11]
- Titles received on exchange from the Russian Academy of Sciences
- Unique publications from South and Southeast Asia produced by governmental and nongovernmental organizations in those regions.
Area Studies
CRL supports collaborative programs that identify, acquire, preserve, and makes accessible primary source collections from all regions of the world. Six projects focused on area studies materials collect valuable resources from Africa [12], Eastern Europe [13], Latin America [14], the Middle East [15], South Asia [16], and Southeast Asia [17]. CRL also actively acquires materials from East Asia, Western Europe, and other areas.
Doctoral Dissertations
CRL acquires about 5,000 non-U.S., non-Canadian doctoral dissertations a year to add to its 800,000+ collection of dissertations. Acquisitions are primarily through the demand purchase program [18] for dissertations and dissertations from exchange partners [19].
Foreign Documents
CRL holds several hundred thousand volumes of publications from government agencies of more than 100 countries. These include a large collection of official gazettes. CRL receives limited government documents in original format and microfiche for South and Southeast Asia on an ongoing basis. CRL frequently augments its historical collections of original format government documents with microform collections acquired through its Purchase Proposal program and additions to Area Materials Project holdings.