Our Collections

Main

National Academies staff members may borrow materials from the journal, book, media, and reports collections. Information on all materials cataloged by the Library can be found in Acadalog, the library’s Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). Acadalog can be accessed via the World Wide Web. Libraries are welcome to use our Interlibrary Loan Services to borrow select materials from the collections.

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Reports Repository

The George E. Brown, Jr. Library maintains the official archives of reports published by the National Academies. This collection is located at the NAS building, 2101 Constitution Avenue NW. Publications in this collection date back to 1920.. Materials in the repository collection “do not” circulate. Advance notice is required for “read only” use of this collection. If only one copy of a report exists, National Academies staff members may use that copy in the library only.

If a second copy is available this may be checked out to staff for the duration of their project or until the material is recalled by Library staff. Repository collection materials may not be borrowed by the public, however, they may be used in the Library, by appointment. The OPAC, Acadalog, provides information on repository collection holdings.

Reference

The reference collection in the Main Library contain various directories, such as American Men & Women of Science, dictionaries, handbooks, indexes, and other non-circulating materials intended to provide immediate answers and to assist in identifying other information sources.

Books

The Library does not attempt to build a subject-specific book collection because of the large number of commissions, their broad range of subject interests, and the relatively short duration of most projects, However, it does maintain a collection of timely and historic science publications, science policy titles, proceedings, external reports, and materials of general interest.

Journals

The Library subscribes to several hundred journals and periodicals that reflect the long-term interdisciplinary interests of the National Academies. As with the book collection, it is impractical to supply specialized titles of short-term interest or of interest to only one group of customers.

Acadalog displays the current issues of selected journal titles that can be used by National Academies staff, in addition to the library’s holdings for each title. Information on electronic journals is also available in Acadalog. In addition to the Library’s print journal collection, the Library subscribes to over 13,000 electronic journals. The majority of these e-journals are licensed for National Academies staff use only.

The Virtual Research Library collection contains a wide range of licensed resources for use by the National Academies staff. These resources include: Academic Search Premier, Agricola, BIOSIS, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Evidenced Based Medicine Reviews (EBM), Criminal Justice Abstracts, EconLit, EMBASE, ERIC, GeoRef, INSPEC, JSTOR General Sciences and Arts & Humanities I, Lexis Nexis, MEDLINE, NTIS, Science Direct, SocioFile, Sociological Abstracts, PsycNFO,, FirstSearch WorldCat, Institute of Physics (current and archives), American Chemical Society, Books and Periodicals Online, Ingenta Gateway, and BioOne.