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).

Dissertations are extensive studies based on original research, written to partially fulfill the requirements for a doctoral degree. While they are typically considered secondary sources, dissertations can also serve as primary sources or be invaluable in identifying and locating primary sources.
Dissertations and theses reflect the quality and breadth of original graduate research at universities, and are often the first form in which scholarly insights and the results of focused experiments appear.  They reveal trends of interest, the rigor of particular departments and institutions, and the creativity of researchers whose influence is still unknown. Since dissertations are grounded in original research, their bibliographies often reference primary sources used by the author, which can lead to discovering manuscripts, diaries, newspapers, and other primary materials of interest.

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.

CRL’s collection related to France is particularly strong in newspapers, official gazettes, legislative debates, and other government publications. Foreign government sets include dispatches and correspondence from U.S. consuls and the U.K. Foreign Office. CRL also has extensive collections of pamphlets and publications relating to the revolutions in France. French literature and drama (particularly 17th–19th centuries) are also well represented. CRL acquires common French newspapers on microfilm through various vendors and French dissertations are purchased through the library’s purchase on demand program.  French is one of our major languages, and the collection includes materials from various countries. 

CIFNAL (Collaborative Initiative for French Language Collections) improves access to French and French-language resources for North American partners as well as providing access to North American resources for French and Francophone partners. It also engages in consortium subscriptions (licensing agreements) to French-speaking databases that are less common in the United States.  CIFNAL has created a libguide that compiles a wide range of digital humanities projects in French and Francophone Studies that are currently underway in various parts of the world. A further project resulted in a database for French and Francophone collections at institutions in the United States and Canada (both hyperlinks to the project are listed on the right side). 
 

CRL's collection of German materials covers a broad spectrum of topics: documents on German foreign policy, colonial affairs, the Reich Chancellery, the military establishment, and the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei (NSDAP) (Nazi Party), including propaganda operations, Jewish persecution, and personal documentation on Hitler and post-War Germany. Primary source materials include newspapers, press articles and clippings; government documents (ministerial acts and protocols; transcripts of parliamentary hearings); personal journals, diaries, and travel records; NSDAP-inspired laws and legal commentaries; military records including wartime maps, directives, intelligence, and reports on treason; war journals and activity reports and their appendices on operations and intelligence; and records of the interrogation of German officials of the Third Reich. Secondary source materials include books, periodicals, pamphlets, research materials and doctoral dissertations. This collection covers a variety of subjects including medicine, law, education, church history, social movements, and finance.

GNARP (German-North American Resources Partnership) in cooperation with the ESS (European Studies Section) created a libguide for German newspapers in North America. GNAPR conducts digitalization of older newspapers and make fewer common databases from German speaking countries available.

 CRL holds an extensive list of German newspapers in microfilm and original papers in their stacks. 

CRL’s collection contains extensive holdings of foreign government publications, information, and data. It includes several hundred thousand volumes of publications from more than 100 foreign governments and their agencies. The collection consists primarily of administrative, legislative, and statistical materials, mostly from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Holdings are particularly strong for Western Europe and Latin America but also contain material from all world regions.

The retrospective holdings were built through deposits by CRL libraries of infrequently held published materials.  A major part of the current foreign documents collection consists of materials received as part of the Library of Congress Cooperative Acquisitions Project program. 

CRL’s collection of U.S. government records is large, including thousands of microform sets issued by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Collections include not only widely used census and immigration data, but also records of presidents, judiciaries, departments, bureaus, and independent agencies, which chronicle the activities of these U.S. government bodies since the Continental Congresses. Most sets are included in CRL's catalog with an indication of NARA's microfilm publication number as a searchable keyword (example: M1160 for the "Maury Abstract Logs, 1796-1861"). Commercially produced sets are cataloged according to title.

An official gazette is the legal newspaper of a country, or of an administrative part of a country, which publishes the text of new laws, decrees, regulations, treaties, legal notices, and court decisions. The Foreign Official Gazette database (FOG) contains records for approximately 650 official gazette titles from countries outside the United States. It serves as a “union list”.  
 

CRL’s human rights collections feature primary source materials ranging from the proceedings of the post-World War II war crimes trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo to the files of the Khmer Rouge Santebal police recovered from the notorious Tuol Sleng Prison in Cambodia. Document types include treaties, speeches, government and NGO publications, reports, addresses from congresses and conventions, newspapers, transcripts, case files, personal diaries of victims of human rights violations, and the papers of human rights activists. Secondary sources include periodicals, dissertations, and published works of fiction and nonfiction covering the breadth of topics in this multidisciplinary field.

Among CRL's most important and unique holdings are extensive runs of several hundred newspapers published in Latin America and the Caribbean, dating from the colonial period to the present. CRL houses rare and uncommon primary sources from Latin America. LAMP (Latin American Materials Project) acquired microfilm sets and digitized many materials. A second program, LARRP (Latin American Research Resource Program), is a collaborative effort to improve access to resources to digital content. CRL’s digital repository contains many government documents and newspapers from Latin America. Some of the digital contents were created by one of these two programs. Here are two examples: The Brazilian Government Document Digitization Project resulted in 673,000 images of government publications. LAMP and CRL digitized executive branch serial documents issued by Brazil’s national government between 1821 and 1993, and by its provincial governments from the earliest available date to the end of the Empire in 1889. The content is available in CRL’s digital depository.  LARRP explored avenues for providing greater access to Latin American Official Documents and administered the Argentine and Mexican Presidential Messages Digital Database.

CRL collaborated with Cornell University Library to support creation of the Latin American Journals Project, hosted by Cornell.  This digital portal leads to a wide range of Latin American popular serial literature published in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Latin America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  “Many of these journals remain difficult to find in their printed form, and/or hard to access in private collections, including in many of the countries where the journals first appeared” (citing Cornell).

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’s collection of Middle Eastern-related material encompasses significant runs of newspapers from every country, dissertations on the Arab world and Islam, monographs and serials acquired through deposit by member libraries, and archival and microform sets of primary source content.  CRL purchases government documents and serials as part in the Library of Congress Acquisitions Program.  CRL continues to acquire current newspapers on microfilm as well as historical backfiles from the region and microform sets prioritized through CRL’s purchase programs.

CRL also supports the Middle East Materials Project (MEMP) in its preservation work and digital activities. Area specialists report that political turmoil jeopardizes the availability of government documentation in any country. CRL now hosts the website Official Gazettes and Civil Society Documentation. This website resulted the collaboration with MEMP.   This effort to preserve and it may be in some cases the only published versions of new laws, legislative debates, and court decisions.  Through the Carnegie-funded effort, CRL harvested nearly 20,000 issues of gazettes from websites of seven countries.  The project “Afghan publications preserved” resulted in materials in Pushto, Persian, and Dari language were microfilmed or digitized.  These materials include holdings from 1924 through 2010 and cover the last years of the monarchy's rule in Afghanistan, civil war, foreign invasion, and the rule of the Taliban.

In addition, MEMP preserved many Arabic and Turkish newspapers such Aljadid, Beirut Times, Habzbuz, al-Dawah, Agos(Akōs), Özgür gündem and others on microfilm. 

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. 
 

SEEMP (Slavic and East European Materials Project) has been preserving primary source materials that span four centuries. SEEMP and CRL acquire and maintain digital and microform materials from Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Poland, Uzbekistan and other major Slavic countries. Some Slavic languages are better represented in CRL’s collection than others; for example, the Russian collection of serials in the STEM fields are common and are frequently requested.  

CRL owns many microfiches and microfilm sets in its collection.  For example, one of the sets includes catalogs, bibliographies, and descriptions of archives in the former USSR.  CRL’s Russian Monograph collection spreads across over many subject fields. The call-number is always an “R” in the beginning and then an numeric as follows: R-15239. 

SEEMP has focused most of its attention on acquiring and preserving regional newspapers, both contemporary and historical. Many Kazakh and Uzbek newspapers were microfilmed in collaboration with SEEMP over the last few years; this has resulted in the inclusion of a long run of Central Asian newspapers. In addition, SEEMP preserved many South Slavic publications such as Politika, Nezavisne Novine, Nasa Borba, Dani, Slobodna Bosna and others on microfilm.

The Center for Research Libraries has collected and preserved archives and heritage materials from South Asia and made them available to scholars since its founding. CRL and the South Asia Microform Project (SAMP) have been sustaining primary source materials that span four centuries and the entire subcontinent. CRL acquires and maintains digital and microform materials from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and other countries. Parts of CRL’s collections were acquired through the P.L. 480 Program, the predecessor to the South Asia Cooperative Acquisitions Program. The collection contains materials in many South Asian languages such as Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, and Urdu. CRL’s collection covers various subject fields.  The South Asia Open Archives Initiative (SAOA) seeks to create and maintain a collection of open access materials for the study of South Asia. Many older SAMP projects resulted in digital content that is available via CRL’s digital depository and the JSTOR platform from SAOA. 

CRL acquires material in any format (microform, newspaper, serials, and government documents) through the Library of Congress Cooperative Acquisitions Program and other vendors. The materials have been published many countries including China, Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and others. CRL supports SEAM (Southeast Asia Materials Project) with its preservation and digital activities. SEAM holdings include more than 300 historic newspapers from every country in the region, in a variety of languages: national, minority, and English or other colonial languages. These collections also include similar numbers of historic journals and government serials and thousands of historic manuscripts. STEAM fields are well presented in CRL’s collection of Asian materials.