What is the Center for Research Libraries (CRL)?
The University of San Diego is a member of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), a partnership of more than 200 university, college, and independent research libraries. CRL acquires and preserves newspapers, journals, government documents, archives, and other primary source materials from a global network of sources, making them available to researchers through interlibrary loan and digital delivery. USD faculty, staff and students are encouraged to use CRL to extend the resources available to our university.
What is available through CRL?
CRL’s deep and diverse holdings support research in the history of science, economics, law and government, immigration and population studies, international diplomacy, and cultural studies. Find this material by searching the CRL catalog.
- Largest collection of circulating newspapers in North America (over 16,000 titles with strengths in various global areas and historical U.S. ethnic titles)
- Over 800,00 foreign dissertations (mostly from European institutions) dating back to the 1800s
- Primary legal and government resources, including foreign and U.S. state documents
- Area studies materials—major microform and paper collections from Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia
- Digitized collections offering over 50 million pages scanned by request or in partnerships
How do I borrow from CRL?
Users can request material from the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) using the Copley Library Interlibrary Loan form. CRL provides extended loan periods for member libraries and strives to lend any quantity of material in any format to members. For more information or assistance with CRL requests, contact your Copley Library subject liaison.
Search the CRL Online Catalog
- CRL Basic Catalog Search Click here to search across CRL's collection of resources.
- Search CRL's Newspaper Collection Click here to browse all of CRL's newspapers or to search by country, state, or ethnicity.
- Search CRL's Catalog of Foreign Dissertations Click here to search across all of CRL's dissertations or to browse by country or awarding institution.
- Search CRL's Catalog of Digitized Resources Click here to search CRL's existing digitized resources.
Sample Uses of CRL Resources
- Cold War Primary Resources Undergraduate Carthage College students in Professor Eric Pullin’s historical methods course used CRL primary source materials for their research papers, focusing on the history of the Cold War.
- Researching the Habsburg Empire CRL digitized nearly 70 reels of pre-World War I German Foreign Ministry documents for a University of Chicago history professor.
- Brazilian Human Rights Evidence Preserved in the Nunca Mais Project Evidence of atrocities in 1960s-70s Brazil, housed at CRL for 25 years, are now available online.
- Primary Sources Improve Course on Vietnam War Propaganda A history professor at Grinnell employed CRL's rich collection of Vietnam War-era newspapers and defense studies to enrich student research on propoganda and public opinion.