News and Publications

Dean of Libraries Xuemao Wang has appointed Clara Drummond as the Director of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives, effective September 1, 2025. As the Director of the McCormick Library, Drummond will provide leadership and management to its forward-thinking special collections and archives program.

Northwestern Libraries and the Affordable Instructional Resources (AIR) are pleased to announce the 2025 awardees for the Open Educational Resources Faculty Grant. Funded by the Office of the Provost and University Libraries, these grants are intended to fund the work involved in finding, creating, using, and sharing OER as replacements for required commercial textbooks.

Northwestern Libraries now provides access to Sage Campus, a suite of online courses focused on research and data literacy skills. Sage Campus provides an accessible and flexible option to grow critical academic and research skills with 40 self-paced online mini-courses designed to supplement your existing coursework.

Northwestern Libraries now provides current faculty, students and staff direct access to The New York Times (NYT), including News, Audio, Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, and The Athletic. The subscription includes access to features directly through nytimes.com and through the NYT mobile apps.

Dean of Libraries Xuemao Wang has appointed Elsa Álvaro as the Associate University Librarian (AUL) for Collections and Access for the Northwestern University Libraries, effective October 1, 2024.  As the AUL for Collections & Access, Álvaro will articulate organization-wide strategies and implement solutions for the development of and access to all library collections.  This role also will lead librarians and staff across all operational areas of the organization to achieve strategic collections objectives. She will define and advance strategies to fulfill the information resource needs of the Northwestern community and pursue innovation, efficiency and cross-institutional collaboration in discovery and delivery of scholarly materials. She will take an active role in developing and maximizing cooperative relationships in the context of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) and other consortia, as well as building partnerships with faculty across campus.

A National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services supports trailblazing work using generative AI to implement a chat search of the Northwestern Digital Collections, as well as to augment human-mediated metadata creation. The two-year grant also supports the creation of toolkits that will help other libraries and cultural institutions experiment and integrate this transformative technology into their discovery platforms.

Richardson’s appointment is a homecoming, as he graduated from the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences with majors in History and English, completed his M.A. in Liberal Studies through the School of Continuing (Professional) Studies, and began his early library career in the Preservation Department at Northwestern Libraries.

Deering Library, which has enchanted students, scholars, and visitors for more than 90 years, is slated for a major renovation that will markedly improve the facility while preserving its history. After years of planning, the renovation will begin in June, following commencement. The work will include the renovation of select prominent public spaces and upgrades to attendant infrastructure. There will be no public access to Deering Library during construction, which is expected to conclude in September 2025.

An exhibition of original art dedicated to the memory of American journalist James Foley opens April 3 at Northwestern University. In Inescapable Truths: James Foley’s Indelible Legacy, conceptual artist Bradley McCallum draws from Foley’s video, photos, and writings he filed while reporting on the Libyan and Syrian civil wars of 2011.

Northwestern students and faculty now have one more research tool available at their fingertips. The Block Museum of Art and Northwestern University Libraries are pleased to announce the completion of a strategic project to integrate the museum’s collection records into the Libraries’ search database. The Block Museum of Art’s collection of over 6,000 artworks is now searchable through Northwestern Libraries’ online catalog via NUSearch.

Northwestern Libraries are pleased to announce that Northwestern has entered another major transformative open access agreement with Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), effective January 1, 2024. The agreement covers a three-year term, until 2027. Under the terms of the agreement, Northwestern readers can access all ACM publications including journals, magazines, books, conference proceedings, and special interest group newsletters, and Northwestern corresponding authors will have their works published with open access licenses at no cost to the author.