The CREST Library was established in 1997 as a means of administering and collecting the journal articles, documents and other items that were used and acquired during the various projects and courses presented by the centre. This collection was later divided into smaller collections for practical reasons and a database was created to facilitate searches. Since 2018 more than 2000 books have been donated to the collection.
The CREST Library consists of 3 collections – 2 hard copy collections (13 115 items) that are housed in the reading room, and an electronic collection (6 489 items).
In order to stay within the bounds of SA Copyright law and fair dealing, this library does not have lending facilities and is not open to the general public. At present only CREST staff members may borrow items from the collections. CREST staff and CREST students are welcome to view items in the reading room and receive an electronic copy of the catalogue by prior arrangement. The library is located in room 4026, on the fourth floor of the Krotoa building, at the corner of Victoria and Ryneveld streets. Contact the library for more information.
What is fair use? In South Africa, the doctrine of fair dealing allows copyrighted works to be used for purposes such as criticism, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. However, in an academic environment, fair use allows users to reproduce a copy, to meet reasonable needs, for their own, study, research or private use without seeking permission from the copyright owner. Multiple copies for distribution of a copyrighted work in a classroom situation does not fall within the parameters of fair use.
The books, proceedings, reports, theses and journals in this dedicated library together offer a comprehensive collection of STS literature from the 1960s, 1970s and most of the 1980s. After that period, the collection does not cover all of the literature, but still has most of the important books. Most of the books are in English, but there are also items in German, French and Dutch.
This collection consists of a number of smaller collections:
The Africa E-policy library was created as part of a project for NEPAD. It was an attempt to document and digitize the policy documents of countries in Africa. This catalogue was used as a basis for this collection. Other electronic documents such as reports, electronic articles and information used for projects, have been added to this collection.