Libraries Description

Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies

The Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies system on the West Lafayette campus includes six subject-oriented libraries, the Hicks Undergraduate Library, and the Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives and Special Collections Research Center. Staff total nearly 150, of which 81 are faculty and professionals. The campus library system includes 3,317,331 printed volumes and electronic books; 227,814 electronic and print journals; and government documents and microforms in excess of 400,000. To complement the online collections, Libraries also houses more than 600,000 volumes in closed stacks that individuals can request for next-day delivery. In addition, any item held in the Big Ten Academic Alliance libraries can be requested directly and typically arrives within a few days.

In December 2018, the Purdue Libraries was renamed as the Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies to better reflect the unit’s many teaching duties and instructional initiatives.

Even in the Digital Age, the physical library remains an important study space for students; door counts have increased to more than two million per academic year. Information to complete assignments is accessible 24/7. The faculty and staff in the Purdue University Press and the University Copyright Office report to the dean of libraries, and the work of these units is integrated into Libraries operations.

The Purdue e-Pubs digital repository, also a part of Libraries, is an open access software platform, which provides access to full-text publications, as well as unique, previously unpublished scholarly content. It currently contains 66,794 items and has registered 19,870,198 downloads as of November 2019.

Award-Winning and International Leadership Initiatives

In 2015, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), honored Purdue University Libraries with the Excellence in Libraries Award based on the Libraries’ numerous innovative initiatives. Those include: leadership in re-defining the role of libraries to meet the needs and expectations of its university; creating a research community in the 21st century, through innovative programs and projects in information literacy; new space designs; new publishing models; international collaborations; and data management (see www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2015/Q1/purdue-libraries-named-2015-acrl-excellence-in-university-library-award-winner.html).

Libraries has re-purposed its library spaces to support and enable study, teaching, and learning to meet students’ needs for team-, active- and collaborative-learning spaces. Such space is typified by the Roland G. Parrish Library of Management and Economics, the Hicks Undergraduate Library, and the Wilmeth Active Learning Center, home of the Library of Engineering and Science, at the center of campus. Of Libraries’ 294,858 sq. ft., 84,755 sq. ft. are designated as study space or carrels with 2,120 seats.

Faculty members in the Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies must demonstrate scholarly productivity, and they often collaborate with other faculty on campus as principal investigators on research projects. Libraries faculty also collaborate with University colleagues by applying library science principles to the management of information and data, whether tangible (archives, books, journals) or intangible (scientific and technical datasets). Libraries faculty are educational partners in the integration of information literacy into the curriculum, as they teach and provide active-learning components to courses in several departments, as well as develop and teach many credit courses as instructors of record.

Faculty and staff in Libraries facilitate and support a significant goal for Purdue students, which is to graduate with the ability to critique, evaluate, and integrate the best and most appropriate information in order to understand problems and devise solutions in their work and throughout their lives.

The Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies has an international leadership role through DataCite and assigns Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to datasets in order to enable attribution and discovery. The Purdue University Research Repository (PURR) is a joint endeavor of Libraries, Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), and the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships (EVPRP). PURR provides an institutional capability for Purdue researchers and their collaborators to manage, publish, and archive their datasets to meet funder data-management plan requirements.

Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies, December 2019