CRL digitization recently reached another milestone: 25,000 titles from digitized CRL collections are now available to CRL members.CRL now hosts over twelve million plus pages digitized from its collections to support advanced research and teaching.
The 25,000th title is a document recently scanned at the request of a scholar at a CRL member institution: Final communique of the Asian-African conference held at Bandung from 18th to 24th April, 1955. The historic Bandung meeting is credited with laying the foundation for the nonaligned movement during the Cold War. Representatives of 29 African and Asian countries, many of them recently emerged from colonial rule, came together in Indonesia to discuss common concerns on topics including nuclear proliferation, human rights violations, and the need for stabilizing trade agreements. The Conference deplored the “policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination . . . in large regions of Africa and other parts of the world.”
With CRL in-house production now digitizing nearly one million pages per year, researchers increasingly access CRL collections through digital delivery. CRL's digital delivery service prevents many materials that are fragile, rare, or unique from being lost, damaged, or destroyed through handling and transport. In deciding what collection materials to digitize, CRL weighs the risk of unintentional infringement on intellectual property rights against the value of providing researchers access to materials that are unique and/or difficult to replace. Approximately 34% of the currently digitized materials are from public domain sources, and thus openly accessible beyond the CRL library community.
Accessing digitized CRL holdings on CRL's upgraded Digital Delivery System (DDS) platform has never been easier: efficient and flexible navigation allows on-the-fly page viewing and calendar date browsing for serial publications. All 25,000 titles hosted on the DDS server can be accessed through the CRL catalog and WorldCat. Records for items digitized from CRL collections are indexed in the major web scale discovery services. To enable a direct link to eresources, libraries may have to adjust local configurations.
