Northeastern University Library

Overview

The Northeastern University Library is the central library system of Northeastern University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The primary facility, Snell Library, is located on the main Boston campus and serves as the hub for collections, research support, digital scholarship, and archival services. The library system also includes the F. W. Olin Library at the Oakland, California campus and the School of Law Library.

History and Founding

Northeastern University was founded in 1898 as a program of the Boston YMCA, and the library's history tracks the university's development over the ensuing decades. Course catalogs dating to 1910 are digitally available, and the university's yearbook, The Cauldron, was first published in 1917. The library has grown into a major research facility with collections of nearly 1.5 million e-books, almost 500,000 print titles, more than 180,000 licensed e-journals, and over 270,000 streaming audio and visual titles.

Archives and Special Collections

The Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections (NUASC), housed in Snell Library, has a twofold mission: preserving the historical records of Northeastern University's academic and administrative units, and preserving the records of Boston-area social justice organisations, communities, and environments. Special collections document the history of Boston's African American, Chinese, LGBTQ, and Latinx communities, as well as civil rights, immigrant rights, urban planning, and environmental justice movements.

Notable collections include the Freedom House Photographs of Roxbury (1950–1975), the Boston Globe Library Collection, the East Boston Community News records, and an extensive set of materials relating to Boston-area labour, civil rights, and progressive organisations. The Northeastern University History exhibit documents the university's development from 1902 to the present through images, course catalogs, and yearbooks.

Digital Scholarship

The Digital Scholarship Group (DSG) supports digital modes of research and publication, and is home to grant-funded projects including the Boston Research Center, the Women Writers Project, and TAPAS (Text Encoding and Archiving Suite). A Digital Repository Service hosts digitised materials from the library's collections.

Access

Snell Library is open to Northeastern students, faculty, and staff. Archives and Special Collections are accessible by appointment for on-site research and provide remote reference services. The library is located at 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston.