CRL recently reached a milestone: over five million pages of digitized items from CRL collections are now available to CRL members. The item that marked this milestone was—appropriate to CRL’s collection strengths in regional newspapers—Growth of Newspapers in the United States (1928), by William A. Dill.
Growth of Newspapers was digitized at the request of a scholar at a CRL member institution as part of CRL’s digital delivery service, where items requested on loan are digitized when time and the format allow. All items scanned for digital delivery are retained and linked from CRL’s catalog, to support future access by researchers.
With CRL in-house production averaging nearly one million pages per year, researchers increasingly access CRL collections through digital delivery. The service offers the advantage of rapid and flexible and access. Digital delivery is one facet of CRL’s strategy to expand online access to its varied holdings, along with partnerships to systematically digitize significant newspapers, government publications, and historical periodicals.