The Official Gazettes & Civil Society Documentation online collection is a collection of official gazettes and historical government documentation from ten African and Persian Gulf countries. This project is the result of the digitization of official gazettes from the Center for Research Libraries‘ extensive collection of print and microfilm. CRL is alos planning on adding to the collection “by harvesting from the web more recent gazettes and related data published digitally”.

This collection includes issues from 24 different titles such as al-Jarīdah al-rasmīyah published in Libya, al-Waqāʼiʻ al-ʻIrāqīyah published in Iraq, or the Gazette of the Democratic Republic of the Sudan. Documents can either be read online or downloaded (full issue or a selection of pages) in PDF format.

Funding for digitization and hosting of the Official Gazettes & Civil Society Documentation collection was provided in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Founded in 1949, the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is an international consortium of over 200 universities, colleges, and independent research libraries in the U.S., Canada, India, Germany and Hong Kong. Since its foundation, CRL has been supporting both research and teaching in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, by preserving and making available to scholars a wide range of primary source materials from all over the world. Based in Chicago,IL, the Centre for Research Libraries is governed by a Board of Directors drawn from the academic community. McGill University has been a member of CRL since 1973.

In 2016, CRL’s collections include five million items -among which more than 38,000 foreign journals, and 800,000 foreign dissertations- and are built by experts working at major U.S. and Canadian research universities.

The Middle Eastern studies’ collection and the South Asian studies’ collection both make accessible invaluable primary sources, in particular runs of historical journals in Arabic, Urdu and Hindi that are not to be found anywhere else.

In addition, the Center for Research Libraries provides access to a number of digital collections. The Digital South Asia Library is a collaborative project developed with the University of Chicago that makes available to scholars monographs, journals, full-text dictionaries, bibliographies, images, maps, and statistical information from the colonial period through the present. The WNA-South Asian Newspapers collection is the third module of the World Newspaper Archive, and includes colonial-era titles in English, Bengali, and Gujarati, published in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka from 1864-1922. Among the key publications: Amrita Bazar Patrika (Calcutta), Bankura Darpana (Bankura), Madras Mail (Madras), Tribune (Lahore) and the Ceylon Observer (Sri Lanka).