About Us

To serve the needs of our diverse community, keeping an emphasis on information literacy.

To develop collections and facilitate access to information resources using the most innovative and cost-effective methods possible with a focus on open access and open resource materials.

To help lead the university in user-based initiatives, such as retention, with professional and scholarly guidance.

The Purdue University Northwest Library provides a welcoming space, physical and virtual, to students on both campuses where they can come to study, access materials, and find answers to their questions.

It supplies licensed online access to high-quality scholarly information and continues to actively manage and cultivate a valuable print collection. The collections number more than one million items including:

• 185,521 print books (titles) 191,423 (volumes)
• 282,479 digital/electronic books
• 10,024 (physical) and 149 (digital) media items
• Approximately 693,000 microfiche and 10,000 boxes of microfilm
• 95,643 online and 33,811 print volumes (1704 physical titles) of periodicals
• 337 database subscriptions

The University Library hosts comfortable, student-focused study spaces and technology at both locations, including private study rooms, computer lab/classrooms and a room equipped with technology and software which allow students to practice presentations.

In addition to books, the library lends over 200 laptops for students to use temporarily or for the semester and has over 150 open PC computers and 6 Macs for general usage, along with 2 all in one (copier/scanner/printer) and two binding machines for student projects.

University librarians teach students and faculty to identify and use a full range of electronic and print resources for their research. Librarians offer both face-to-face and telephone reference assistance, as well as online consultations via a variety of platforms, including email, Zoom, and LibChat.

Customized instruction sessions are provided on request to foster information literacy skills and improve overall student success. Supplemental online guides are developed by librarians for individual subjects or courses to reinforce basic research skills.

Librarians work with program administrators and individual instructors to collaborate on meeting students at their point of need, and in many cases liaison librarians and course library guides are embedded directly into individual course sites within Brightspace, the PNW Learning Management System.

This helps to open a direct line of communication with students and remind them that librarian assistance is only a click away. Purdue University Northwest is also part of PurdueBorrow, a resource-sharing tool between all Purdue campuses.

The university archives preserve institutional knowledge from Purdue University Calumet, Purdue University North Central, Purdue University Northwest, and the greater Calumet Region. Our collections include 268 processed physical collections, over 2,500 titles in Special Collections, approximately 10,000 historical photographs, and over 61,000 digital assets.

Our physical collections are managed in ArchivesSpace, while our digital assets are preserved and made accessible through two digital repositories, Preservica and the Internet Archive.

The University Archives has also partnered with the Calumet Heritage Partnership to establish an Industrial Archive for the Calumet Region.