Special Collections and Archives

This newly refurbished area of the library houses the NSU archives, a rare book collection, and numerous collections of materials (books, papers, and artifacts) dealing with local, state, and regional history (Germans from Russia collection, the South Dakota National Guard collection, among others), especially regional water issues (The Harriet Montgomery Water Resources Collection). In addition, this area is home to the library's digitization efforts (http://digitalcollections.northern.edu).

The Special Collections and Archives have grown substantially over the recent years, receiving numerous donations from both on campus and off campus. These gifts need to be processed: accessioned, inventoried, and arranged in a way that makes them accessible to users, and stored in an archivally sound manner. Gifts to support this work are needed.

Committed to the Present

The library is one of students' favorite places in which to work. Survey after survey backs this up. It is a goal of the librarians to seamlessly and holistically support all of students' information needs, from searching to publishing. We now are asked as many questions about software and web tools as we are about information resources. To this end, we find ourselves needing to reconfigure space and furniture in the library to support changing student needs. This includes designing collaborative workspaces so students may accomplish group projects in a more conducive atmosphere and where students can have the benefit of consulting with librarians.

To accomplish this above, and to eliminate one of the most common complaints we hear - that the computers in the library are slow and out-of-date and there are not enough of them - the library needs an endowment to support the purchase of computers/technology and associated equipment (printers, scanners, etc.) especially for student use; for staff use; and to support the purchase of furniture.

We see the library as an important part of the intellectual life of the campus in which the library's "Round Room" could function, as it has sometimes in the past, as a gathering and presentation place. To further this, we would like a gift to purchase easily moveable chairs so the round room can be converted to hold an audience of 60 and an endowment to support a bi-annual lecture series and bi-weekly faculty/student research symposia.