Our investment in the future

The NU Libraries are planning for and redefining what the Library needs to be in order to deliver in both its virtual and its brick-and-mortar forms. This means continued work and investment to increase the range and richness of our collections and to accelerate their transformation from mainly-print to mainly-digital. 

Our Digital Repository Program offers secure environment for the storage, management, and access to digital materials produced and/or used in the course of the University’s teaching, research and service activities.  These include over 50,000 digitized university faculty publications, university records, and historical documents from our special collections.

We offer access to 60,000 ejournals [1], and hundreds of licensed databases [2] containing over 200,000 ebooks as well as searchable articles, documents, images, data, and streaming music and video.

Print and Circulating Collections

Snell Library's circulating collections include books, proceedings, CDs, DVDs, periodicals and newspapers.  The F. Andre Favat Collection provides a current collection of children's literature, and some K-12 curriculum resources, instructional materials.  

The library houses the University Archives and Special Collections [3], encompassing historical records and publications of Northeastern University - its colleges, centers, and administrative units - and the records of Boston-area social justice organizations that serve under-represented communities.

Snell Library is an official U.S. Federal Government Depository [4], with over 160,000 documents and electronic access to millions more. Federal publications are listed in NuCat [5]. Public access to federal government publications on deposit in all formats is guaranteed by Title 44, Section 1911 of the United States Code. 

Managing our collections

With the University’s focus on research that addresses global imperatives such as health, security, and sustainability, the Library supports faculty and scholars who are forming partnerships and con- ducting highly interdisciplinary work to produce breakthroughs in these areas.  An active liaison program ensures that our team of subject librarians is in constant communication with Northeastern scholars to develop collections to meet their research needs.  NUCat, our online catalog, provides searchable access and links to all the items in our print and electronic collections. 

See more facts and statistics [6] about our collections.