The main library stands on East Jones Street, neighbor to the State Legislative Building, a short walk from the North Carolina Museum of History and the Museum of Natural Sciences. The clustering is no accident. North Carolina's cultural and governmental institutions occupy a small downtown grid where the legislature, the executive branch, and the keepers of public memory deliberately sit within sight of one another. The library belongs to the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, the same agency that protects historic sites and runs the state's museums.

Among librarians, the North Carolina newspaper microfilm collection is the kind of resource people travel to use. Over three million pages drawn from nearly every one of the state's 100 counties — some titles dating to 1751, before the United States existed. The papers are closed-stack: visitors request specific dates from the Information Desk, then unspool history at a microfilm reader. For genealogists, it is a place where ancestors stop being names and start being people, found in marriage announcements, obituaries, school graduations, and the small-town columns where nineteenth-century communities recorded their daily lives. The Genealogy Reading Room sits on the mezzanine, open stacks, the only floor where you may pull what you want yourself.

In 1958, the North Carolina Commission for the Blind asked the State Library to take on a new role: providing books to readers who could not see them. The Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped now operates from 1841 Capital Boulevard with large print, braille, and audio collections. The audio is recorded at slower speeds than commercial cassettes and records, so the library also loans the specialized playback equipment patrons need. It is a quiet form of equity, working in the background — books reaching people who cannot read in the usual way, on machines lent free of charge.

The 1987 legislature established the State Publications Clearinghouse so that every state agency report, study, and bulletin would find its way into 22 depository libraries scattered across North Carolina. The Clearinghouse now collects digital publications too, and the North Carolina Digital Collections portal makes more than 90,000 photographs, documents, and manuscripts free and full-text-searchable to anyone with an internet connection. NCpedia, hosted on NC LIVE, provides an encyclopedia of the state's people, geography, and history. The 1812 statute simply asked the Secretary of State to catalog books. Two centuries later, the catalog goes everywhere broadband reaches.

The State Library certifies North Carolina's public librarians, sets the standards their profession must meet, and channels federal Library Services and Technology Act grants — $4.4 million in 2006-2007 alone — to academic, public, school, and special libraries across the state. The Library Development Section sends staff out as liaisons to specific counties, training, advising, and helping small-town libraries punch above their weight. It is unglamorous infrastructure work: the kind of effort that, done well, lets a child in a rural county pull a book from the shelf without ever knowing how it got there.