Halvorsen Library

Hours

Twenty-four hour access during finals week for anyone with a student ID.

Collections

• University Archives. Institutional records back to the 1893 charter, including the original enrollment ledger.
• Regional Industrial History Collection. Company records, oral histories and technical drawings from Wesconsin manufacturers dating to the 1900s.
• Design & Engineering Media Collection. Student capstone reports, senior design portfolios and technical drawings, cited regularly by employers checking a candidate's prior work.

Data & research services

The library hosts the university's open research data repository and offers one-on-one consultations with a research librarian for any capstone, thesis or sponsored project.

Free & open collections

Halvorsen Library keeps a subscription collection, but a great deal of what students and faculty use every day is open — free to read and reuse, maintained by libraries, archives, museums, and governments worldwide. The library curates the ones Porter relies on most:

• Free & open collections. Open Library, the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, the Digital Public Library of America, Project Gutenberg, OpenStax, arXiv, PubMed Central and more — with a librarian’s notes on how to use each well.
• Open resources. The full guide, adding open data (Data.gov, FRED, Our World in Data, USGS) and free tools (QGIS, Desmos, PhET, Purdue OWL), organized by what you are trying to do.
• Interlibrary loan. If it is not open and the library does not hold it, request it — most articles arrive within a day or two.

The library also runs an open-access publishing fund for Porter authors and welcomes conversations with other libraries, archives, and open-knowledge projects about linking, sharing metadata, or a formal partnership.

Floor guide