Everyone is welcome to visit the Glennan Memorial Library at NASA Headquarters, also called the NASA HQ Library. NASA Headquarters civil servants and contractors should sign up to be library patrons so that they can make the best use of its resources and services. The NASA HQ Library is a full-service library, like a college library, located at 1J20 near the West Lobby. The library can be reached on the phone at (202) 358-0168 or via email at library@hq.nasa.gov. NASA Headquarters civil servants and contractors can also use the online Ask A Librarian service.

The NASA HQ Library helps NASA Headquarters civil servants and contractors conduct research on any work-related questions in its collection of books, journals, and audiovisual materials, and through searches through databases such as Factiva, Dialog, and the NASA Aeronautics and Space Database. Over a fifth of the NASA HQ Library's books are owned by no other library in the world, making it a unique resource for the agency and the nation. If a civil servant or contractor's research requires a report, article, or book that the NASA HQ Library does not have, the staff will do their best to get it from another library. The staff can also demonstrate methods of efficiently searching the Internet and our databases.

The NASA HQ Library helps NASA Headquarters civil servants and contractors to keep in touch with developments in their fields through its weekly and monthly alert services. These services cover dozens of separate topics, drawing articles from a wide selection of periodicals, including newspapers such as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, trade journals such as Aviation Week and Space Technology and Flight International, and popular journals such as New Scientist and Time.

The NASA HQ Library is the only NASA library that is open to interested members of the public. It is regularly visited by students conducting research on science policy and the history of aviation and spaceflight. The staff can also reply to questions sent to them via letters, phone calls, and email from members of the public. Many of the resources listed in the library's bibliographies are available to the public either online or through their local public libraries.