About Our Collections
General Collection
The University Libraries’ collections include more than 2.6 million titles. We now house 1.2 million printed volumes and provide access to more than 110,000 journals, more than 1.2 million electronic books, and more than 750 electronic databases. We also offer nearly 300,000 streaming media titles (films and music), and a curated collection of films on DVD for instructional and general use.
The Library Catalog of UNCG currently contains holdings for materials in the Walter Clinton Jackson Library, the Harold Schiffman Music Library, the Intercultural Resource Center, and the Teaching Resource Center. Special Collections, Rare Books, and University Archives are increasingly available via the online catalog.
REference
The Reference Collection is located in the ROI Department on the first floor of the Library’s main wing. The collection consists of general and specialized encyclopedias, dictionaries, directories, and biographical sources. The Reference Collection also includes government reference sources, indexes and abstracts, and a map collection containing more than 12,000 items. Items do not circulate. The ROI Department’s Research Guides provide access to online and print resources on a variety of topics.
Government Information
The Government Information & Documents Guide provide extensive links to local, state, and national government information. The Government Documents collection is a part of the ROI Department. Service is at the main Reference Desk on the 1st floor. The collection includes both Federal and North Carolina documents. The Library Catalog contains records of the Library’s collection of Federal documents published after 1976 and NC State documents published after 1987.
Music Resources
The Harold Schiffman Music Library is located on the main level of the Music Building (corner of West Market and McIver Streets) and supports the educational, research, and service goals of the University by providing music resources, information, and services required by students, faculty, staff and community members. Our collection consists of sound recordings, video recordings, scores, books and serials about music. Faculty, staff, and students are welcome to come to the Harold Schiffman Music Library to listen to and view sound and video materials and to check out books and scores.
Special Collection & Archives
The Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) is located on the second floor of the Library’s main wing. SCUA houses rare books, photographs of the campus, performing arts collections, artifacts and textiles relating to student life, and archival and manuscript materials that document the history of the University.
Among the major book collections in Special Collections are the large and significant Woman’s Collection, with titles from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries; the American Women’s Detective Fiction Collection; the Girls’ Books in Series Collection; the American Trade Binding Collection; the Juvenile Collection; and the Book Arts Collection, containing a large compilation of artists’ books, private press productions, books with fine illustrations, and books on bookbinding, typography, and papermaking. Among major authors represented with significant holdings are George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Lois Lenski, Randall Jarrell, T. E. Lawrence, Rupert Brooke, and Charles Dickens. SCUA also has a manuscripts collection of 395+ individual collections. Particular strengths of the collection are creative writing, including the papers of Randall Jarrell and mystery writer Margaret Maron; the fine and performing arts, including the papers of composer Peter Paul Fuchs; women’s studies, including the letters of noted suffragettes; the records of business and political leaders of the Piedmont region of North Carolina, including Congressman Howard Coble and philanthropist Joseph M. Bryan.
University Archives materials date from the founding of the University in 1891 and include the records of the presidents and chancellors, Boards of Trustees, faculty and student committees, societies and organizations, student publications, and many of the University’s academic departments and administrative offices. Besides paper records, this collection includes extensive holdings of photographs, scrapbooks, oral histories, postcards, artifacts, and textiles.
SCUA also is the steward of two internationally known collections: the Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project and the largest holding of cello music-related materials. The Women Veterans Historical Project documents the female experience in the armed forces through 500+ individual collections (diaries, photographs, correspondence, and artifacts) as well as 300+ oral histories. The cello collection is made up of published scores, books, annotated scores, and manuscripts. A selection of this extensive collection includes materials connected to: Elizabeth Cowling, Maurice Eisenberg, Bernard Greenhouse, Fritz Magg, Rudolf Matz, Luigi Silva, Janos Scholz, and Laszlo Varga.
course Reserves
Most of our reserve materials are now available online through course sites in Canvas, but we do still maintain a small print reserves collection located at the check out desk on the the first floor.
