The Center for Research Libraries makes available more than 4.5 million publications, archives, and collections and well over one million digital resources to its members libraries to supplement their own humanities, science, and social science holdings. Center materials can be obtained for extended loan periods and at no cost by users affiliated with member libraries. In most cases, items requested from CRL should arrive within one week and items that can be delivered electronically should arrive in one or two business days. In some cases, material will be digitally scanned and offered that way. Please consult with a research librarian (researchhelp@vassar.edu) if you have questions.

• 6,500 international newspapers, many dating to the 1700s--the largest collection of circulating newspapers in North America. Search their international newspapers collection.
• 4,500 U.S. newspapers, many dating to the colonial era, including 2,000 ethnic titles. Search the collection of US ethnic newspapers.
• Foreign journals that are rarely held in U.S. libraries
• More than 800,000 foreign dissertations.
• A rapidly growing collection of over 1 million digital resources. View highlights of the digital collections.
• Significant holdings of major microfilm collections.
• Area Studies - Major microform and paper collections from Africa, Latin America, Middle East, Europe, Asia, Southeast Asia and other world regions. See Collection Highlights and CRL's Topic Guides for more detail.
• CRL Digital Collections, to support teaching and research at member libraries, scanned by request. CRL also negotiates favorable licensing terms and pricing for member libraries to commercial digital collections. See their CRL Licensing page for more information.

For a broad overview of CRL's collections, consult their Topic Guides.

CRL also has purchase programs that allow member libraries to request the purchase of significant collections that are not widely held. There are three separate programs:

Demand Purchase Program in which CRL will purchase foreign newspapers, dissertations, or archival material from national governments and/or NGO's.

Purchase Proposal Program allows member libraries to nominate the purchase of microfilm sets not readily available. Member libraries then have an opportunity to vote on which sets to purchase.

The Shared Purchase Program supports the cooperative acquisition of costly major microform or printed sets that were nominated and considered for the Purchase Proposal Program, but were not of sufficiently broad interest to warrant purchase under the funds earmarked for that program. These sets are normally of high interest to a small subset of CRL libraries.

For more information, see the information on the Cooperative Collection Building page at CRL or talk to a research librarian.

To identify materials at CRL, please search their online catalog. 
(Not everything in the CRL collection is cataloged. If you don’t see what you are looking for, contact a research librarian, researchhelp@vassar.edu, and we'll find out for you.)

Place your request using Vassar Libraries' interlibrary loan forms. (Please make a note on the ILL request form that you found this item at CRL. Also, most items in the CRL Catalog list an OCLC#, e.g. OCLC # 11502875, and including this number on the ILL request form will help us to expedite the processing of your request.)