SDSU Expands Research Resources Through Consortium of Libraries

“Joining CRL ensures that our students and faculty have access to the resources they need to promote innovation and impact in teaching and scholarship.”

San Diego State University is now a member of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), a prestigious international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries.

Membership in the consortium opens up vast new resources for research and teaching, especially in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, and provides essential support for the growing research enterprise at SDSU. 

"We are delighted to add SDSU to the CRL community,” said CRL President Greg Eow. “SDSU joins one of the most important academic efforts to preserve and make available important resources to support top-tier research. We look forward to this partnership and the opportunities for research and teaching it will enable.”

CRL maintains deep and diverse collections of primary source material beyond those available in most individual libraries and promotes collaboration among institutions to ensure those collections nurture innovation in teaching and research. CRL collections and services are shaped by experts who work together to identify and preserve unique and uncommon materials and to ensure their long-term integrity and accessibility to researchers worldwide.

Primary source materials are available in both digital and printed formats and include approximately five million newspapers, journals, books, pamphlets, dissertations, archival materials, government publications, and other resources beyond what is currently available through the SDSU Library.

“For more than 70 years, CRL has been a vital resource for academics across many disciplines, with unmatched digital collections and increasingly enhanced and relevant reference works,” said College of Arts and Letters Dean Monica Casper. “The college will benefit tremendously by SDSU's membership in CRL.”

Casper added, “Our faculty in ethnic studies, anthropology, political science, area studies, geography, history, philosophy, and more will be well served by CRL's digital collections that range from Africa Studies to Water Resources. We look forward to a long relationship with CRL, especially given SDSU's Research 1 aspirations."

CRL collections are especially strong in areas such as law and government and science, technology, and engineering, but also include areas as diverse as historical collections of K-12 textbooks, history of agriculture, and international collections focused on areas such as Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia.

While many of these collections are available in print or microformats, CRL provides online access to a continuously expanding body of digital materials and has added 5.5 million pages in digital format in the last year.

Cristina Alfaro, interim associate vice president for international affairs, stated “as SDSU moves toward a comprehensive internationalization strategic plan we will benefit tremendously from our membership in CRL. The global breadth and depth of CRL’s digital collections and resources will undoubtedly enhance our international curriculum and research.”

CRL’s World Newspaper Archive contains more than 70 newspapers published between 1800 and 1922 in Sub-Saharan Africa, offering an unrivaled viewpoint into a time of significant change. Its Mexican Intelligence Digital Archives is a crowd-sourced, public access digital archive of historical documents from Mexican intelligence agencies between 1940 and 1985. 

SDSU Library staff are adding CRL resources to the library catalog to enable access directly from OneSearch. However, library users who wish to explore this resource before the cataloging work is complete can use the CRL catalog.

SDSU librarians are available to help faculty and students find the right resources and subject specialist librarians are available for Zoom meetings to help with research. CRL also offers webinars and presentations to help researchers find their way around their collections. An orientation to CRL resources and services for faculty is planned for the spring 2021 semester.

“SDSU has made a strategic commitment to becoming a premier public research university,” Library Dean Scott Walter said. “Joining CRL ensures that our students and faculty have access to the resources they need to promote innovation and impact in teaching and scholarship.”