Librarians purchase, select, and filter collections to give them context. In today’s online world, this value-added intervention is one of the factors that distinguishes a library from a search engine.

Increasingly our role extends beyond buying collections to building the services and tools that make collections more meaningful.

Wu’s Top Resources

JSTOR, a searchable database of full-text articles from important scholarly journals in the humanities and other disciplines.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers, a database of U.S. newspapers. “A historian’s dream.”

IU WorldCat and Interlibrary Loan, a means to locate and request books from any library in the world.

The stacks. “We love books. We’re historians.”

There are nearly 12 million items in IUCAT, the university’s online library catalog. Approximately 66 million journal articles are searchable from within IU WorldCat.

IU received 46,274 requests from other libraries to borrow our materials this year.

IU Libraries collections now include 816,255 e-books, a 29% increase over the previous fiscal year.

1,071 documentary films are streamed online for the IU community.

Assistant Professor of History Ellen Wu (left) asked students in her intensive writing course to conduct a research project using primary sources, and as a result, senior Jessica Reddick (right) discovered library resources she previously knew nothing about. Reddick, now a history major, turned her project into cash: she won the Sam Burgess Undergraduate Library Student Research Award by using collections from the Wells Library and the Kinsey Institute. “We’re all participating in a conversation,” Wu says of historians. “Library databases such as JSTOR provide an easy way to join that conversation quickly and comprehensively.”