Hesburgh Libraries Featured Resources – If you’ve ever felt like the library has more databases, journal packages and tucked-away corners than you could ever wrap your head around, this blog is for you.

June 24, 2026

Collection Strategy at Hesburgh Libraries

Photo of 10th floor of the Hesburgh Library — Renovated 10th floor of the Hesburgh Library, a popular study space. (Photo by Becky Malewitz/University of Notre Dame)

By Julia Schneider, Scholarly Resources & Assessment Librarian-Arts, Humanities, & Architecture | Medieval Studies Subject Librarian | Germanic Studies Subject Liaison

Purchasing materials for the Libraries is not a matter of chance. At Hesburgh Libraries, we have an approach to collections that has several practical components and many points at which decisions are made. In the past decade, the Libraries have adopted an e-preferred collection strategy in relevant disciplines, which allows us to maximize both our budget and the content we provide by investing in digital products that will allow Hesburgh Libraries to best support the research of our current students and faculty.

How does this collection strategy work? Before we get into the details of current acquisitions methods, a dip into the recent history of acquiring materials in academic libraries might be helpful.

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March 12, 2026March 13, 2026

Primary Source Databases: Bringing the Past Closer

During last month’s Winter Games, the Hesburgh Libraries shared a news story about the Olympic Movement: Sport, Global Politics and Identity database. It’s a collection of digitized historical sources, telling the story of the birth and development of the modern Olympic games. The database includes thousands of primary sources from a hundred-year period, starting with the first Olympic games in Athens in 1896, up through the 1990s. To illustrate the collection’s scope, a few examples might be useful:

Poster for the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam.

The poster for the 1928 games in Amsterdam.
An official sightseeing guide from the 1936 Berlin games – along with a large collection of newspaper clippings about complaints and protests leading up to those games.
A 1972 letter from the US Olympic Committee to the University of Notre Dame’s Director of Bands, expressing concern that Notre Dame’s proposed marching band tour might be using the “Olympic” branding without official permission.

You might wonder why we would make such a big deal about this collection. Aren’t these sources just freely available online somewhere? Absolutely not.
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February 11, 2026February 19, 2026

Resource Round-Up: February 2026

By Megan Elsen, E-Access Librarian

As many of you may know, we have access to several EBSCO databases through the INSPIRE contract, which is made available to all residents of Indiana courtesy of the Indiana State Library. Due to budget constraints for the Indiana State Library, we lost access to a lot of the resources made available through this partnership last summer. However, thanks to a recent generous $2 million grant from the Lilly Endowment, we once again have access to some great EBSCO databases!

Here are some highlights of the collections that are included/restored :
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January 20, 2026March 16, 2026

EBA’s: Where Did We Get All of These E-Books?

Image Alt Text — July 28, 2023; Beth and Lou Holtz Family Grand Reading Room in Hesburgh Library, in the area formerly referred to as the fishbowl. (Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame)

A year ago, the Hesburgh Libraries announced that the Notre Dame community had newfound access to tens of thousands of e-books from the publisher Taylor & Francis and its imprints, including Routledge and CRC Press. Overnight, 37,000+ e-books became available for ND students, faculty, and staff to use.

Where did all of these Taylor & Francis e-books come from? Did the Libraries buy them? Are they ours forever?

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January 20, 2026January 21, 2026

Launched: Featured Resources Blog

We are officially pulling back the curtain with the Hesburgh Libraries’ newest blog, Featured Resources. If you’ve ever felt like the library has more databases, journal packages and tucked-away corners than you could ever wrap your head around, this blog is for you. From shiny new subscriptions and expanded e-book content, to little-known digitized primary source collections, this blog is your insider guide to taking full advantage of the library.

But we aren’t just spotlighting resources. This blog will go behind the scenes and shed light on the strategies guiding the Hesburgh Libraries’ collections decisions. How does the library always have the exact e-book you wanted? Are the library’s e-books ours forever, or just temporary? If you publish an article, can the library help you publish it Open Access? (Spoiler: it’s complicated.) The Featured Resources blog will answer these questions and more, providing the insider details that true library fans crave. Think you’re an expert on the library’s collections? Just wait.