About Us

In addition to providing the highest level of support in the area of information literacy, NU librarians serve as the primary contact between the Library and the schools. This improves communication and provides outreach opportunities between the library and the NU community, enables the Library to make more qualitative and data-informed collection development and service improvement decisions, and provides increased visibility for the Library across the university. Librarians advise students, faculty, and staff on library resources, services, and policies. Additionally, they offer numerous specialized services, including the following:

• Discipline-specific reference support
• In-depth, personalized research consultations
• Library instruction
• Faculty support
• Collection development and analysis
• Creation of subject guides that correspond to each of the academic specializations at NU

Librarians establish and maintain regular communication with colleagues in the University regarding Library resources, services, policies, and usage data/trends. Communication includes, but is not limited to, the following:

• Posting Library announcements to the Commons
• Emailing the school deans when appropriate
• Attending/presenting at school meetings when appropriate
• Attending/presenting at university meetings, including Symposium and Academic Summit
• Presenting at student orientations
• Presenting at Dissertation Boot Camp and DCP Intensive Course

Additional details about librarian services appear in the sections below.

The Library is dedicated to supporting student learning and success in the area of information literacy. Students can reach library specialists for general, live reference support via Ask a Librarian, chat, email, phone, and text message. All contact information is included on the Library’s home page.

Reference assistance from reference librarians is a distinct service consisting of discipline-specific, advanced research support via phone call, email, chat, Ask a Librarian, or live Zoom meeting. Faculty may also partner with a librarian to create a personalized support plan for one or more students.

Librarians create and present subject-specific instructional sessions including recorded library workshops and quick tutorial videos. Librarians may collaborate with faculty members to create new instructional resources or sessions based on student needs.

Librarians provide advanced assistance to meet students’ specific research needs in the form of in-depth, personalized, one-on-one research consultations. Research consultations are most beneficial to doctoral students who are already familiar with basic library search techniques, have a clearly identified research topic, and have already done significant research on their own.

Librarians are dedicated to supporting the NU curriculum by providing high-quality resources, including databases, journals, videos, library guides, etc. Faculty may contact librarians for assistance with the following:

• Course revision support (i.e., locating resources to replace outdated or irrelevant sources in the current syllabus)
• Creating effective assignments utilizing Library resources
• Locating persistent URLs for Library resources
• Creating or updating Library subject and course guides
• Assistance with copyright questions
• Library collection holdings review for new programs
• Requests for new databases or collections (including demos and trials)

Additional Resources: