UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
The Stony Brook campus houses a number of libraries to meet the informational and cultural needs of students and faculty. Collectively, the East and West Campus libraries contain more than two million bound volumes, 8,300 newspaper and periodical subscriptions, 4,800 circulating video titles, and three million microform publications—making ours one of the largest academic libraries in the nation.
The Main Library
The Frank Melville Jr. Memorial Library—the main library building on campus—is open Monday through Thursday, 8:30 a.m. to midnight; Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.; Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.; and Sunday, noon to midnight. Within the architecturally distinctive Melville building are collections serving the social sciences, humanities, fine arts, music, engineering, and geosciences. Service units provide ready access to reference tools, current periodicals, government documents, maps, microforms, legal materials, patent searchers, and state-of-the-art computer facilities. Tours and orientation programs are offered each semester to incoming students.
There are six branch libraries on campus. Four of these—Chemistry, Computer Science, Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, and Mathematics/Physics/Astronomy—are located in departmental buildings. All are self-contained units and have networked workstations. The Science and Engineering Library, housing collections in engineering, biology, and the geosciences, and the Music Library, which maintains printed scores, books, journals, manuscript facsimiles, compact discs, audio cassettes, LPs and reel-to-reel recordings, are located in the Main Library. The Special Collections Department and University Archives house rare and fragile materials, as well as items of historical or bibliographic significance. Manuscripts, letters, pamphlets, broadsides, and maps are included in the collections.
As in most academic libraries, optimum use of the library now often depends upon using both electronic databases and the library's Web pages to locate other resources in the library system. Top-flight research, abstracting, indexing, and full-text electronic resources—like Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, The Web of Science, ScienceDirect, OCLC's FirstSearch, and JSTOR—are available.
The Libraries' main Web page can be accessed through the Stony Brook Home Page or directly at sunysb.edu/~library. Through the Web page you can search for titles and use the online research resources right from your residence hall or home computer.
Catalogs and Collections
The electronic catalog and indexes to our collections are known as STARS—the Stony Brook Automated Retrieval System. Searches can be done on the electronic catalog and indexes by Author, Call Number, Keyword, Subject, Title, Date, Language, and format.
The holdings of all University libraries—the Main Library, the Science and Engineering Library, the science branch libraries, the Music Library, and the Special Collections Department—are available on the electronic catalog.
The collections comprise vast holdings of books, periodicals, microforms, newspapers, maps, videocassettes, DVDs, music scores and recordings, legal and government documents, online databases, and reference works covering every area of serious academic study and research.
The University Libraries' collections are particularly strong in the areas of Anglo-American Literature, French Literature, Hispanic Literature, Philosophy, Comparative Studies, Theatre Arts, Marine Sciences, Chemistry, History, Psychology, Biology, Maps, Video Resources, Music, and the Geosciences. As new programs arise and degrees are offered, through gifts and donations, and through the expansion of new technologies that can deliver information, images and text, the University Libraries are constantly adding to the size and scope of their collections, and are redefining themselves in the process.
Health Sciences Library
The Health Sciences Library, located on Level 3 of the Health Sciences Center, serves the educational, clinical, and research information needs of the faculty, staff, and students in the schools of Dentistry, Health Technology and Management, Medicine, Nursing, Social Welfare, the Basic Sciences, the University Hospital Medical Center, and the Long Island Veterans Home. It also functions as a regional resource assisting health care professionals throughout Long Island.