Campus libraries support teaching and research at the undergraduate and graduate levels in all fields covered by the Department of Sociology and serve as a resource for the citizens of North Carolina. Collections for sociology rank among the top twenty university libraries in the country, with strengths in comparative/cross-cultural and historical sociology, cultural and social institutions, ethnicity/ethnic relations, family and kinship, gender and sex roles, human ecology, life course/span, Marxism/socialism and other socio-economic and political ideologies, methodology and quantitative methods, organizational studies, poverty, public policy, race and racism, regional sociology (and regions/regional development in general), social and political philosophy, social movements, social psychology, social stratification, sociological/social theory (including its history and development and major theorists), statistics and statistical data (both in print and electronic formats), urban affairs/studies in general, work and occupations, 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 a wide range of relevant foreign-language materials 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 sociology. In addition to comprehensive general and reference collections for all other social science fields, Davis Library also has important specialized resources for sociologists 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.

Carolina Population Center's Library collects specialized materials on demography and population, while the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science Library Data Archive has one of the oldest and largest collections of machine-readable data in the U.S, offering extensive holdings of census and related social, political and economic statistics. The Odum Institute also 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 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. 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.

Duke University libraries possess significant resources in that complement what can be found in campus libraries on foreign countries, especially for Brazil, Canada, Central America, Japan, Korea, Mexico, South Asia, and the British Commonwealth countries of Africa, and for the sociology of religion, while the NCSU libraries have specialized holdings on rural sociology and agrarian/rural topics. The libraries' membership in the Center for Research Libraries provides users with additional collections of specialized materials, particularly foreign dissertations, legal materials, government publications for the United States at both federal and state levels and for foreign countries, books and periodicals not in English from outside the United States, foreign newspapers, ethnic newspapers published in North America, census publications from the entire world, and large collections of microforms on foreign countries.