Center for Research Libraries Global Resources Program

The Global Resources Programs are communities of interest that work with the Center for Research Libraries. Librarians, subject area experts, and scholars identify materials at risk of destruction or decay as well as other materials that are difficult to access in North America. These programs increase the accessibility of these materials though microfilming, digitization, and/or description. The association of multiple programs with CRL helps to reduce costs and effectively administer the work. The mission of the Global Resources program has expanded over the last several decades, but it has its roots in the growth of area studies research associated with the funding for African, Latin America, and Middle Eastern Studies during the global cold war.

Four significant materials projects were formed in the 1960s and 1970s. The first, the Cooperative Africana Materials Project (CAMP) was founded 1963 and focuses on preservation of materials from Sub-Saharan Africa. These multilingual materials include newspapers, journals, government documents, as well as personal archives. The South Asia Materials Project (SAMP) was founded in 1967 in affiliation with the Association for Asian Studies builds and maintains a digital and microform collection of materials including reports from the British East India Company, pamphlets and titles. A particular strength of this project is an emphasis on linguistic diversity, particularly the effort to preserve and make accessible texts in 22 languages, including Hindi, Urdu, and Panjabi.

The Southeast Asia Materials Project (SEAM), founded in 1970, preserves and maintains digital and microfilm material from Indonesia, Vietnam, and other Southeast Asian countries. The project offers access to more than 300 newspapers representing every country in the region. The Latin American Materials Project (LAMP), founded in 1975, acquires, preserves, and maintains microform and digital collections of research materials from Latin America, including Central America and the Caribbean. Notable collections include materials from Brazil and Haiti.

Latin America is doubly represented amongst the CRL’s Global Resources Programs. The Latin Americanist Research Resources Project (LARRP), founded in 1994, is an initiative that supports the expansion of access to information and materials related to Latin American Studies. LARRP’s Digital Initiatives project funds the creation of digital resources, including the digitization of print materials held in member libraries. LARRP also organizes the Distributed Resources project, which is an agreement between participating North American Libraries to collect in specific areas. This ensures that non-core texts are available for researchers through interlibrary loan services. The third current project is Open Access Monographs, which is funded by eight LARRP member libraries and organized in partnership CLACSO, JSTOR, Libreria Garcia Cambeiro. This effort focuses on making Latin American monographs available as open access books.

Two additional area studies materials projects were launched in the 1980s and 1990s. The Middle East Materials Project (MEMP), founded in 1987, focuses on preserving material from Arab countries, Israel, Turkey, Iran, and other related areas. Notably, the project includes acquisition and preservation of more than 100 newspapers in Arabic, Turkish, and English. The most recently created of the area studies project groups, the Slavic and East European Materials Project (SEEMP) was founded in 1995 and focuses on preserving materials from a large region including Eastern and Central Europe, Russia, and other countries in Central Asia that were part of the former Soviet Union. One notable focus is the effort to acquire and preserve regional newspapers, and another is a project microfilming material produced by Ukrainian Displaced Persons.

More recent projects focus on topical issues, for example the Human Rights Archives and Documentation Program (HRADP), founded in 2007. Others promote sharing of European language materials, like the Collaborative Initiative for French Language Collections (CIFNAL, 2006) or the German-North American Resources Partnership (GNARP, 1998). The International Coalition on Newspapers (ICON) was founded in 1999 to gather data on physical and digital newspaper collections and preserve newspapers through microfilming and digitization. The Technical Report Archive and Image Library (TRAIL), founded in 2006, makes US government documents digitally available. Finally, the most recent program, the Print Archive Network (PAN) has focused on managing print collections in libraries since 2009.

https://www.crl.edu/collaborations/global-resources-programs

Contributed by Jennifer Schaefer