Topic Guides

CRL’s collection of African-related resources contains a wide variety of newspapers, monographs, archival collections, serials, government publications, and dissertations, spanning four centuries and covering virtually every country in Africa. Significant country strengths include South Africa, Nigeria, Senegal, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In addition, materials related to Africa are collected from sources in the U.S., England (particularly from the British Library and National Archives), France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, and others. The major institutional focus for the collection of Africana at CRL has been provided by the Cooperative Africana Materials Project (CAMP). CAMP acquires major microfilm sets and conducts original microfilming and digitization of resources for preservation and wider accessibility. These collections provide a depth of content that augment CRL’s scholarly resources.

CRL’s agriculture collection has grown through deposit of the membership, specific projects, and direct acquisition. The collection has strengths in plant and animal culture as well as statistical information in Area Studies and government documents holdings. More than 120 countries are represented in the collection; about half of the resources come from the U.S., West Germany, Russia, India, Sweden, and Japan. CRL's extensive dissertation collection contains a representative sample of content related to agriculture from European institution. CRL continues to add digital resources to its collection through Project Ceres (in partnership with the United States Agriculture Information Network (USAIN) and the Agriculture Network Information Center (AgNIC).

Primary sources for medieval studies have typically consisted of manuscripts and incunabula housed in special collections, microform series containing voluminous manuscript collections, as well as print facsimile and standard critical editions of classic works. CRL’s medieval resources are primarily Western European and are a result of either deposit or the use of various collection programs CRL offers.  Examples of acquisitions include the set of microfiche Arabic Manuscripts in the British Library - Hadith Kalam from the Purchase Proposal Program, and the microfilm set Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts of St. John’s College, Oxford: manuscripts dating from the 10th century to the 16th century through the Shared Purchase Program.

Doctoral dissertations, while not primary sources, offer vital resources for medieval studies. CRL holds more than 800,000 foreign doctoral dissertations from universities outside the U.S. and Canada. These dissertations provide North American researchers with the most current analyses from the European scholarly community. Access to European dissertations puts the North American medievalist in close dialogue with a vigorous community of scholarly inquiry into the Middle Ages in the contemporary U.K., France, Italy, Germany, and beyond. CRL’s collection of dissertations are included in the main catalog, and can be searched under the “Dissertations” tab on the online catalog page. A keyword search on “medieval” or “mediaeval” retrieves almost 1,000 records. Current acquisitions of dissertations focus on purchasing dissertations through the Demand Purchase Program.

CRL has vast holdings of newspapers from all regions of the world; as well as collections of scripts, transcripts, and translations of news reports produced or compiled by the British Broadcasting Corporation, CBS, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, and the Voice of America. Newspaper holdings include over 19,000 titles, more than 10,000 of which are published outside the U.S. CRL endeavors to collect extensive and, whenever possible, complete runs of newspaper titles, and its holdings of some titles are the most complete in existence. All newspapers can be searched in CRL’s catalog. 

CRL’s major strengths are:

• African American newspapers
• Civilian Conservation Corps. Camp papers
• Underground and alternative press
• U.S. ethnic newspapers

CRL maintains subscriptions to news titles, purchases and produces microfilm of selected international publications, licenses and digitizes collections, and obtains additional acquisitions through CRL’s purchase programs. Many individual newspaper titles are available in more than one format, depending on the period. Newspapers are an important source of information for all time periods. More and more newspapers are available digitally or gathered (aggregated) in a searchable database. 
 

The History of Science, Technology, and Engineering (STE) is an eclectic discipline, with faculty working with an extensive range of sources and utilizing a variety of methodologies. The history of science attracts a broad range of interest in its various domains, from philosophy and mathematics, to physical and biological sciences, to technology and agriculture. Scholars are interested in all eras of history, from the pre-modern era to the 20th and now into the early 21st century.

As a discipline, STE historians see interconnections between the history of science and the history of civilization broadly conceived. Historians examine not only the writings, theories, logic, and discoveries of scientists, but also the external social and cultural factors that influence scientific thought and development. Additionally, historians seek to understand how scientists interacted with their subjects, the public, and the world at large.

In addition to CRL’s own rich collections in the History of STE (see next tab), CRL’s Global Resources Partnership with the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology enables access to the trove of resources collected and maintained by Linda Hall in areas including engineering, physics & astrophysics, and chemistry (among others). CRL facilitates document delivery and digitization of articles, monographs, and historical serials from the collections of CRL and Linda Hall.