With holdings of over three million volumes, the Rutgers University Libraries rank among the nation's top research libraries. Comprised of more than two dozen libraries, centers, and reading rooms located on Rutgers' campuses in Camden, Newark, and New Brunswick/Piscataway, and RU-Online, a digital library, the libraries provide the resources and services necessary to support the university`s mission of teaching, research, and service.

There are two large research libraries on the New Brunswick/Piscataway campuses: the Library of Science and Medicine, which houses the primary collections in behavioral, bio­logical, earth, and pharmaceutical sciences, and engineering; and the Archibald S. Alexander Library, which provides extensive humanities and social sciences collections. The Mabel Smith Douglass Library supports undergraduate education and houses the primary collections for women's studies and the performing arts. The Kilmer Library is the primary business library in New Brunswick and provides support for undergraduate instruction. There also are several specialized libraries and collections in the New Brunswick/Piscataway area including Alcohol Studies, Art, Stephen and Lucy Chang Science Library, Chemistry, East Asian, Mathematical Sciences, Music, Physics, and Special Collections and University Archives.

The Scholarly Communication Center supports the development and integration of scholarly/scientific/educational information into the mainstream through a wide range of innovative digital services. The Marjory Somers Fosters Center is a resource center and digital archive on women, scholarship, and leadership. A reading room for graduate students is located in the Alexander Library. In addition to study space, the Graduate Reading Room includes graduate reserve materials, a noncirculating collection of standard works in the social sciences and humanities, and locked carrels for students working on their dissertations.

The John Cotton Dana Library in Newark (which also houses the Institute of Jazz Studies) supports all undergraduate and graduate programs offered on the Newark campus with an emphasis on business, management, and nursing. The Robeson Library houses a broad liberal arts collection, which supports all undergraduate and graduate programs offered on the Camden campus. Law libraries also are located on both the Camden and Newark campuses and have separate policies and online catalogs. The law library at Newark also houses an extensive criminal justice library.

Of interest to faculty and graduate students are Rutgers' memberships in the Research Libraries Group, the Center for Research Libraries, the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc., and other academic library consortia. These consortia give members of the university community access to the collections of the most distinguished research libraries in the country, including those at California (Berkeley, UCLA, and others), Stanford, Yale, and the New York Public Library, and timely delivery of research materials. Shared catalogs may be searched and items requested online.

The libraries provide numerous electronic resources to the Rutgers community. Library users can search IRIS, the online catalog, through the libraries' web site at http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu. IRIS identifies materials owned by Rutgers libraries in Camden, Newark, and New Brunswick/Piscataway, and contains records for most items acquired since 1972. Students, faculty, and staff also can access online a variety of electronic indexes and abstracts, full-text electronic journals, research guides, and library services online, both on campus and remotely. The librar­ies provide hundreds of CD-ROM titles in addition to online resources.

Rutgers University students, faculty, staff, and alumni are entitled to borrow materials from any of the Rutgers University Libraries. The Rutgers Delivery Service, Interlibrary Loan Service, and E-Z Borrow allow library users to request books and journal articles located at distant Rutgers libraries or outside the university. The loan period for faculty, staff, and graduate students is one full term. All other borrowers, including undergraduate students, may keep materials for 28 days. All materials, regardless of loan period or borrower`s privileges, are subject to recall.

Librarians, many with advanced subject knowledge, are available at all of the major libraries to assist with research projects, classroom instruction, and research strategies. In addition to individual instruction at the reference desk, librarians also provide in-class teaching at instructors` requests. Librarians are available to help with both computerized and noncomputerized reference searches.

The libraries are committed to providing equal access to services and collections for all library patrons. Users with disabilities may request special services through the circulation or reference department in each library.