CRL is a consortium of more than 200 research libraries that is set up to acquire important but relatively rarely used materials in support of teaching and research. Some examples:  African-American Press Collection, South African Political Ephemera (1964-1990), ACLU Archives (1912-1950), British Trials (1660-1900), Italian Books before 1601.

Large microfilm sets of all kinds, newspapers (U.S. and foreign), dissertations (foreign), journals (science, technology, trade, industrial), government documents and publications (U.S. and foreign).

Students and faculty can borrow large amounts of material (e.g., extensive runs of newspapers on many reels of microfilm) from CRL for long periods of time: 90 days with unlimited renewals. For selected materials not owned by the Center - foreign dissertations, and microfilmed archives and newspapers for which the Center has incomplete holdings - faculty can request up to $2,000 in purchases annually.

It is important to remember that the CRL catalog is not complete, though it is being updated constantly. Depending on your interests, you should consult their supplementary guides and listings, all linked from the main catalog page - i.e., newspaper listings (by country), microfilm collections (by subject), topic guides (overviews by subject).

Penn Interlibrary Loan offices can request materials from CRL for use at Penn. Since there is no direct link to Interlibrary Loan from the CRL web pages, please complete and submit a Penn library interlibrary loan request form and ILL staff will transmit your request to CRL. It would be helpful if you annotated your request to indicate the material was discovered at CRL.