Adams Library
The Library (https://library.ric.edu) offers a welcoming environment to support the intellectual and cultural diversity of our campus. Library faculty and staff assist users at the reference and borrowing services desks and by phone, email, text and chat (https://ric.libanswers.com). Library faculty collaborate with college faculty to create library instruction for specific courses focused on the discovery, use and evaluation of library resources and information on the web.
The Library is located at the heart of campus, and is open 80 hours per week during the academic year. Students will find a variety of spaces to meet their needs including collaborative study spaces, individual carrels and tables for independent study. A floor dedicated to silent study is located on level 2. The Curriculum Corner is housed on level 4 and provides instructional material and curriculum development resources for teachers and teacher education programs.
Print collections include more than 203,000 books and 503 journals. The library also has a collection of government publications, a DVD collection of films and documentaries, and a variety of music CDs. Electronic collections include over 439,000 e-books, 117,000 e-journals, and a diversified selection of 111 databases. Remote access is available to all electronic resources. In addition to our collections, students can borrow laptops, iPads, external hard drives, graphing and business calculators.
The College Archives, a rich depository of the history and records of Rhode Island College, as well as faculty and alumni publications and student theses, are located in the Special Collections Department. Special Collections includes a number of subject collections consisting of papers, books, manuscripts and other resources that document the state’s education, ethnic and socio-political history. A growing number of student theses and honors projects, faculty publications and Special Collections materials are also accessible electronically in the RIC Digital Commons.
The Library is a member of the HELIN (Higher Education Library Information Network) consortium, which consists of 7 academic libraries, where the RIC community has on-site access to collections and reciprocal borrowing privileges with their RIC ID. Library users may request items from other libraries via interlibrary loan using our online catalog.