The Cooperative Africana Materials Project (CAMP) recently preserved several newspapers from Somalia and Somaliland collected by the Library of Congress Field Office in Nairobi. Issues of the twenty titles span the years 1998 to 2012. 

A number of CRL staff members will attend this year’s ALA Annual Conference in Las Vegas, June 26–July 1, to report on, and gather input for, CRL programs.

New reviews in The Charleston Advisor, an online review of electronic resources, include several financial and government information databases: Bloomberg Professional Service; Risk Management Association eStatement Studies; and State Stats, from CQ Press.

The Middle East Materials Project (MEMP) has digitized two newspapers related to Iraq that are now available online through the CRL Catalog.

At its recent Annual Meeting, the Board of Directors of the Center for Research Libraries welcomed one new board member and re-elected three current board members to second terms.  

CIFNAL (Collaborative Initiative for French Language Collections) announces that four librarians have been awarded stipends of $1,250 each to attend the 2014 AIFBD Conference August 23–26, 2014, in Limoges, France.

With the support of 17 member libraries, CRL will acquire four microform sets through its 2014 Shared Purchase Program. The total list cost of these acquisitions, which benefit all CRL members, is $42,200.

With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a vigorous overhaul of the LIBLICENSE model license is in progress under the auspices of the Center for Research Libraries.

CRL’s eDesiderata platform, designed to provide information about and track the status of e-resources under consideration for member licensing, has a new customizing feature: meDesiderata.

The Collaborative Initiative for French Language Collections (CIFNAL) will offer up to four stipends for staff members at CIFNAL institutions to attend the AIFBD Conference August 23–25 in Limoges, France.

Recent reviews in The Charleston Advisor, an online review of electronic resources for libraries, include Black Freedom I: Federal Government Records, and Black Freedom II: Organizational Records and Personal Papers; Caribbean Search; Statista; Gale’s Artemis: Literary Sources, Early European Books, The First World War; and two collections in ProQuest’s History Vault: Vietnam War and American Foreign Policy, and American Politics and Society from JFK to Watergate.

The Center for Research Libraries recently received funding to support international analysis and planning for archiving and strategic digitization of print journals and newspapers. CRL will use these funds to expand its collecting and analysis of data on archiving and digitization efforts in the two domains, and promote coordinated, strategic action in these areas by libraries and consortia.

Some key CRL staff members will attend ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia (January 24–28) to report on and gather input for CRL programs.

The Middle East Materials Project (MEMP) recently broadened its mission to incorporate digital preservation and electronic access initiatives in its regular activities. Since July 2013, five institutions have joined MEMP.

The Middle East Materials Project (MEMP) has microfilmed several years of the Kurdish newspaper Aso.

The Cooperative Africana Materials Project (CAMP) has microfilmed issues of seven Liberian newspaper titles from the holdings of Michigan State University.

The Center for Research Libraries will purchase eight valuable microform and reprint collections through this year’s Purchase Proposal Program, with a list price value of $125,886. These sets will soon be available through interlibrary loan from CRL.

In recent years, CRL’s Area Studies Microform Projects supported the preservation of more than 300 newspaper titles collected by the Library of Congress overseas offices, ensuring scholarly access to more than 450,000 pages of news from Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.   

Loans of primary resources from CRL’s collections to scholars have shown striking recent growth.

CRL’s Print Archives Preservation Registry (PAPR), a registry of print archives and shared print programs and a database of titles and holdings preserved by those programs, now provides comparison reports to aid collection development decisions and planning.