Library Overview

The Center for Research Libraries, a partnership of over 200 North American university, college, and independent research libraries, manages and develops a shared collection of primary source materials for advanced research and teaching. The collection offers the rich diversity and depth of resources necessary for the creation of new knowledge. Holdings are especially rich in newspapers, archives, journals, and government documents, many of them from non-U.S. sources. While many of the center's collections are not special collections in the traditional sense, most of the more than 4 million items held by the center can be found in few other North American libraries.

CRL has developed the collection over the past half century through purchases and deposits, with the aim of supplementing on-campus and local holdings of its member research libraries. Notable CRL collections strengths include holdings of newspapers, government documents and archives, and journals of trade and learned societies.

CRL has one of North America's three largest circulating collections of newspapers from all parts of the world, including newspapers published in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America, as well as those published in the United States by ethnic and diaspora communities. CRL possesses a vast array of published and unpublished government documents and reports from the early nineteenth century through 1950, including archival collections, legislative journals, and official gazettes issued by governments on five continents. Dating from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, CRL's trade journals document ideas, trends, and achievements in the arts, sciences, trades, and industries in the United States and Western Europe.

Center for Research Libraries
6050 South Kenwood Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60637-2804
http://www.crl.edu/
(773) 955-4545 (t)
(773) 955-4339 (f)