CRL holds more than 800,000 doctoral dissertations and Habilitationsschriften from universities outside of the U.S. and Canada. The collection was built by deposits from member libraries and exchange or depository arrangements with almost 100 universities.

Current acquisitions and services focus on purchasing dissertations through CRL’s purchase programs, acquisitions through deposit or exchange agreements and providing members with information about open-access dissertations.

Brief description:

• Most were written in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, but dates range from 1800 to the present.
• Most are from countries in Western Europe, such as Germany, Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Many are from other countries in Europe and Latin America, South America, and Africa.
• More than 80 languages are represented in the collection. The breakdown of languages is: 66 percent German; 16 percent French; 6 percent English; 2 percent Dutch; 1 percent Latin and Swedish; and less than 1 percent for other languages.
• Contains about 120 dissertations by nobel laureates and numerous other notable scholars. All of the nobel laureates dissertations are digitized and a sizable portion of the notable scholars dissertations are digitized as well. 

Finding dissertations in the CRL collection:
All dissertations can be most easily searched in the dissertation scope of the CRL catalog, which has drop-down searches for country and university. This Google Map  shows location for dissertations owned by CRL and includes catalog links for the dissertations.

Digitized or electronic dissertations:
CRL’s digitization-on-demand service has digitized over 3,000 dissertations from CRL’s collection. The number of dissertations digitized from the collection continues to grow and can be searched via CRL’s catalog digital resources scope.