Campus libraries support teaching and research at the undergraduate and graduate levels in all subject and licensure fields covered by the School of Education and serve as a resource for the citizens of North Carolina. Resources for education rank among the top twenty university libraries in the country, with strengths in theory and practice of teaching, curriculum and instruction, gifted and special education, school administration, child development, psychology and counseling, and gender- and race-related topics. Materials related to the American South and North Carolina specifically are among the most extensive found anywhere. The libraries acquire English-language books and periodicals (including e-journals) comprehensively from all parts of world and subscribe to the major databases. Because the libraries also support graduate programs in psychology and dozens of social and health science fields, resources on related subjects of interest to faculty and students are typically available on campus.

The Walter Royal Davis Library houses the major collections and services for education, including a collection of current North Carolina state-approved text books in the LT classification. With the exception of most older government documents and individual titles in large microform collections, nearly all library holdings are in the online catalog. In addition to comprehensive general and reference collections, Davis Library also has important specialized resources for education in its government documents collections. Complementing electronic resources available from campus libraries, the Odum Institute Data Archive provides assistance in locating and ordering data from other locations such as the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), which stores and distributes data from both individual researchers and many federally funded social science studies (including the International Archive of Education Data), and maintains data files previously obtained from ICPSR.

The Media Resources Center, located in the House Undergraduate Library, complements Davis Library with its audiovisual resources in education. Wilson Library's North Carolina Collection has in-depth resources related to North Carolina. The Law Library has comprehensive holdings of legal materials. In addition to global collections of more than five million volumes, over four million microforms, nearly two million government documents, hundreds of thousands of audiovisuals, maps and photographs, tens of thousands of print subscriptions, campus libraries offer more than 500 databases and over 40,000 electronic journals.

The libraries' membership in the Center for Research Libraries provides users with additional collections of specialized materials, particularly foreign dissertations and government publications, books and periodicals not in English from outside the United States, foreign newspapers, ethnic newspapers published in North America, and college catalogs and elementary and secondary level textbooks.