The full archive of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)'s official scholarly research journal, College & Research Libraries (C&RL), is now available for free. The move is seen as part of the association's commitment to scholarly publishing and open access.
The online C&RL archive now contains the complete contents of the journal from its beginnings in 1939 through the current issue. The archive is available through the C&RL website.
C&RL archival contents from 1939 through 1996 were digitised through the volunteer efforts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library. The library's Digital Content Creation department performed scanning and metadata creation for the approximately 340 back file issues of the journal in 2011 and 2012. The digitised files were added to the journal's online presence with the financial assistance of the ACRL Friends Fund.
Published since 1939, C&RL enacted an open access policy in April 2011. C&RL will become an online-only publication in Jan. 2014.
Hosted through HighWire Press, a division of the Stanford University Libraries, C&RL's online presence seeks to provide a variety of robust features. Online readers have the ability to comment on articles, share contents through social media and perform basic and advanced searches across C&RL and other ACRL serials. A variety of RSS feeds and e-mail alerts provide notification of the availability of newly posted preprint and issues contents. Articles are freely available to read online or download as PDF files. The mobile-optimised version of C&RL online allows readers to read and interact with articles from their smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices.
