Campus libraries support teaching and research at the undergraduate and graduate levels in all fields covered by the Department of Exercise and Sport Science and serve as a resource for the citizens of North Carolina. Collections for exercise and sport science probably rank among the top twenty university libraries in the country, with strengths in athletic training, exercise physiology (including biomechanics of sports and kinesiology), human anatomy/physiology, physical education in the schools, physical fitness/wellness, psychology and sociology of sport, sport administration, sports medicine, sport in society/history of sports (especially baseball in the U.S. and sports in classical antiquity), recreation and leisure studies, cultural and government institutions, gender and sex roles, human ecology, life course/span, methodology and quantitative methods, organizational studies, race and racism (with strong holdings on American blacks in sports), statistics and statistical data (both in print and electronic formats), and in-depth resources for the study of the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Western Europe. Materials related to all aspects of population/demography (including migration) or 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 as well as essential foreign-language materials related to history of sports and subscribe to the major databases. Because the libraries also support graduate programs in 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 exercise and sport science. In addition to comprehensive general and reference collections for all other social science fields, Davis Library also has important specialized resources for faculty and students in exercise and sport science in its geographic information systems service and government information and microforms collections. With the exception of most older government documents and individual titles in large microform collections, nearly all library holdings are in the online catalog. The Media Resources Center, located in the House Undergraduate Library, complements Davis Library with its audiovisual resources.

The Health Sciences Library has the major collections for biomedical subjects of interest, while Wilson Library's North Carolina Collection has in-depth resources related to North Carolina. 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 at Carolina with additional collections of specialized materials, particularly foreign dissertations and government publications, books and periodicals not in English from outside the United States, newspapers published abroad, and large microform sets.