The Information Resources Division (IRD) provides information and library support to Department of Commerce employees. The Library maintains a collection of books, journals, technical reports, and compact discs to support research in: astrophysics, atmospheric sciences, chemical engineering, chemistry, engineering, geophysics, optics, materials science, measurement science, physics, solar physics, statistics and telecommunication sciences.

The collection includes approximately 50,000 print and 2000 electronic books, 580 current print journal subscriptions, over 700 electronic journals, 29,000 bound journal volumes, 12,000 hard copy technical reports and 20 CD databases. The library collects a small number of government documents. All technical reports produced by the Boulder Laboratory research agencies are collected. Scientific publications from NOAA, NIST and NTIA are collected on a limited basis. The University of Colorado - Boulder is a Federal Depository Library. Our patrons may use CU's collection or we will provide interlibrary loan service for these materials.

Services include: Circulation, Reference, Literature Searching, Document Delivery and Interlibrary Loan / ILLiad.

The Library provides many databases for searching. Selected databases include: Aquatic Sciences & Fisheries Abstracts, ArticlesFirst, Books In Print, Dissertation Abstracts, GEOBASE, IEEE Xplore, ingenta, INSPEC, Meteorological and Geoastrophysical Abstracts (MGA), Oceanic Abstracts, Proceedings First, Web of Science (Science Citation Index), and World Almanac.

In addition, the Library has a website (http://library.bldrdoc.gov) that provides access to the online catalog, electronic journals and books, weekly list of new books and book request form, interlibrary loan requests, subject guides, and links to numerous information sources on the Internet.