In the field of finance and investment, the library has the historical collection of investment services such as Moody's and Standard and Poor's Manufacturer's Directories and the Harvard University Baker Library's Collection of historical annual reports of top 500 corporations on microfilm. The Economic Library of Jacob H. Hollander, Ph.D. Compiled by Elsie A. G. Marsh. English is the dominant language of the collection. Materials in Western Europe languages are also collected in varying degrees of intensity. Materials in Slavic and Eastern European languages and materials in Asian and Middle Eastern languages are collected only in cooperation with the Slavic and Eastern European Library and the Asian Library, respectively.
Emphasis is on scholarly treatment rather than popularization, textbooks, and children's literature.
The Undergraduate Library normally collects more popular treatments and the Education and Social Sciences Library collects children's literature for its School Collection. The Commerce Library collection represents the four general subject disciplines of accountancy, business administration, economics, and finance. Peripheral areas such as computer science, sociology, psychology, and law are also included insofar as they are required as part of the College of Commerce curriculum. In the field of accountancy, the collection covers not only the early history and development of the discipline as bookkeeping, but also its modern manifestations such as auditing, financial and management accounting, management information systems and data processing, taxation, and social and behavioral dimensions of accounting. There is only a very slight overlap with law.