Annual Report, 2025-26

Annual Report to the Provost

July 1, 2025 — June 30, 2026

View this report as a PDF

Section I: Unit Activities that Align with Wolfpack 2030 Strategic Plan Goals

Goal 1: Empower students for a lifetime of success and impact.

• Employed students in High-Impact Experiences in support of the "Packways: Learning by Doing" Quality Enhancement Plan, and offered career development panel sessions for student employees.
• Supported the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and AI literacy through consultation, instruction, and online tools, and with a $100,000 Google Academic Research Award for "A Curriculum on Responsible AI and Information Policy for Educators."
• Expanded experiential learning opportunities through deeper curricular partnerships, new assignments, and assessment rubrics for activities such as making, digital media creation, data science, and virtual reality.
• Offered many popular programs to help students explore career paths and gain hands-on skills, including Making Space, featuring practitioners in fields such as biology, entomology, publishing, and science communication.
• The Libraries' Student Scholarships Program awarded a total of $152,438 to 26 students, 10% more than last year.

Goal 2: Ensure preeminence in research, scholarship, innovation and collaboration.

• Launched a subscription for Keenious, an AI-powered platform that complements traditional literature searches by analyzing text inputs and recommending sources.
• Advanced resource sharing of research materials among UNC institutions through system-wide agreements, improving speed, service levels, and loan periods.
• Supported 17 open access (OA) agreements to cover the OA article processing charges (APCs) for NC State authors. In 2025, 822 articles were covered with net cost avoidance of $2,895,638. Since 2022, these agreements have saved over $6M for 1,748 articles.
• The Research Facilitation Service (RFS) saw a 32% increase in requests this year from 37 departments and centers across 10 colleges. It also supported two core facilities and the "research thrust leaders" for Woodson Hall in planning for their labs' infrastructure and applying for federal funding to build them.
• Added new features to the Citation Index, a bibliometric tool that documents and visualizes the work of NC State researchers, including national lab engagement metrics, Genesis Mission Challenge area researcher matching, and collaboration mapping.

Goal 3: Expand and advance our engagement with and service to North Carolina and beyond, defining the standard for a 21st-century land-grant university.

• Featured the exhibit, "A Fair to Remember: The History of the North Carolina State Fair" in the Hill Library's exhibit gallery, showcasing the unique and archival collections in the Special Collections Research Center.
• Implemented an LSTA-funded grant project ($398,000), "Extending NC Cooperative Extension Digital History," digitizing thousands of items from the University Archives and the State Archives of North Carolina.
• The RFS collaborated with the Plant Sciences Initiative and the Ag Analytics Platform by serving on its steering committee and helping recruit two research computing positions to support AI-accelerated bioeconomic research in this joint effort between North Carolina A&T and NC State.

Goal 4: Champion a culture of equality, belonging and well-being in all we do.

• Acted as a campus leader in implementing accessibility and universal design principles benefitting users on multiple fronts. Implemented the Libraries' University Digital Accessibility Plan in preparation for meeting the WCAG Level 2.1 AA federal guidelines.
• Implemented usability enhancements such as a dark-mode option for the website, based on evidence that 38% of users choose that setting.
• Provided a variety of programs focused on belonging, well-being, and creative activities that help support mental health and stress reduction for students and staff.

Goal 5: Improve university effectiveness through transformative technologies, cutting-edge processes and actionable data.

• Planned and implemented a major transition to a new integrated library system for managing collections, electronic resources, and patron transactions, replacing a system that had been in place for more than 20 years.
• Worked to ensure the reliability of the Libraries' mission-critical website in the face of heightened traffic and threats from Internet crawlers and bots.
• The RFS worked with the Bioinformatics Research Center in the College of Sciences to establish an ecosystem of computational and data support for bioinformatics researchers both within and beyond that college.

Goal 6: Lead in developing innovative partnerships, entrepreneurial thinking and applied problem-solving.

• Enhanced NC State Esports as a platform for teaching, student engagement, industry partnerships, and campus visibility. Hosted major programs in the Lenovo Esports and Gaming Lab such as the eBaseball World Championships with Konami and the first NC State Collegiate Game Jam, drawing participants from nearly every college.
• Provided essential space and operational support at the Hill Library for faculty and staff in the College of Education and Department of Psychology displaced by the closure of Poe Hall.

Goal 7: Elevate the national and global reputation and visibility of NC State.

• Achieved the largest fundraising year in the Libraries' history with $7,388,097 in pledges, bequests, and outright gifts, a 609% increase from last year.
• Closed the transformational gift from Lenovo to name the Lenovo Esports Arena in Mann Hall and the Lenovo Esports and Gaming Lab at the Hunt Library, establishing NC State Esports as a national leader.
• Managed the Duke Energy Hall at the Hunt Library, hosting over 300 events and providing campus stakeholders access to this premium event space on Centennial Campus.

Section II: Topics Relevant to the Unit

Program Updates or Changes: Include scope of activities, volume of activities, special achievements, or significant and special program reviews, studies or plans

Scope and volume of activities are addressed in the Volume of Activities table below.

Initiatives: Major initiatives and/or changes to programs or activities

• Partnered with University Data & Analytics (UDA) to transition the "brand administrator" support role for the university's Qualtrics survey software to the Libraries.
• Collaborated with other Provost's units on a plan for the Libraries to manage Woodson Hall's video wall content and help support its student spaces, public safety, and security.

Staff: Major new appointments, kudos, professional activities and recognition

• Susan Ivey was appointed as Associate Director for Digital Strategy.
• Moira Downey was appointed as Director, Research Facilitation Service.
• Colin Nickels was named a 2026 Library Journal "Mover & Shaker" for his work in experiential learning.
• A Libraries team received the gold Well Wolfpack Certification from Wolfpack Wellness.

Challenges: Recommendations and concerns for the future

• Funding the NC State Esports Program: The Lenovo Esports and Gaming Lab's personnel and operational costs are currently funded only through FY26, and permanent funding is needed to continue this program.
• Managing the Research Collections in a Changing Environment: Collections inflation continues to loom as a major budgetary challenge: five-year impacts range from $2M—$3M. AI tools circumventing traditional research practices are reducing documented usage levels for e-resources while open access publishing provides documented citation and reputational advantages. The Libraries leverages its large subscription packages to include support for article processing charges for NC State authors.

Opportunities: Advancement for growth in the future

• The rise of AI requires libraries to support AI literacy for students and faculty and integrate AI strategically into their operations while addressing shifting copyright laws and ethical, environmental, and data privacy concerns.
• The proposed Experiential Learning Center (ELC) at the Hunt Library would provide a critical mass of student resources on Centennial Campus, including a greatly enlarged Makerspace, Active Learning Labs and spaces dedicated to data, media, visualization and collaboration.

NC State University Libraries 
Volume of Activities
(25/26, 24/25, 20/21, 15/16)

Services

Collection Use, Expenditures, and ARL Rankings

Library Spaces

Collection Statistics

* The Libraries closed on March 16, 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and ran at one-third seating capacity during fiscal year 2020—21. Some services were closed that year.

Notes

1. User visits include all Libraries locations including the affiliates (College of Education Media and Education Technology Resource Center (METRC) and the African American Cultural Center Library). METRC was relocated from Poe Hall to the Hill Library in November 2023 and has reduced its seating capacity by ~80 seats (77% reduction in seating).
2. Instruction and outreach includes 571 instruction sessions in faculty classrooms; 231 instruction sessions in colleges, departments, centers, and other units on campus; 264 Libraries workshops; 210 Libraries outreach programs; 117 wellness programs; 134 orientation tours; and 112 METRC sessions.
3. Includes print circulation, reserve materials (both print and electronic), and textbooks.
4. Increase in e-book usage due to major publishers reverting back to accounting for usage at the book section level, rather than the book title level, which was done only in FY 2024 and FY 2025.
5. Includes library-related expenditures made by colleges and units outside of OUC 25. Excludes benefits.
6. Currently ARL's membership includes 118 North American academic libraries.
7. Public seating counts do not include auditoriums, faculty and graduate student study rooms and commons, teaching labs, or high-tech spaces. Card-access spaces include faculty and graduate student study rooms and commons, and teaching labs.
8. Makerspace usage is based on door entrances and laser cutting requests (performed in-house).
9. Usage totals represent the number of times digital media applications are used on the Libraries public computing stations.
10. The Lenovo Esports and Gaming Lab opened on January 16, 2024.
11. High-tech spaces include the Hill Library's Cyma Rubin Visualization Gallery and the Hunt Library's Teaching & Visualization Lab. Spaces are used for courses, demonstrations, workshops, seminars, research (including thesis presentations), and events.
12. The iPearl Innovation Studio opened on February 8, 2021.
13. Represents 94 events involving 55 collaborations with 19 campus units/centers, five colleges, five external organizations, four student organizations, and two academic programs.
14. The historic volume count has been changed to reflect the titles available in the Libraries' collection.
15. Electronic subscriptions = 121,038; Print subscriptions = 349.
16. Includes e-books, e-journals, and e-databases; includes NC LIVE resources.
17. Includes the Special Collections Research Center's rare and unique materials, scholarly publications in the Institutional Repository, the Design Library Image Collection, and the Inside Wood Collection. Digital collections data collection was initiated in FY 2016—17.