Library Development
Supporting and enhancing learning, teaching, and research
More than three hundred years ago, Yale University was founded with a gift of 417 books. Out of this donation grew an unsurpassed institution of higher learning and a library that attracts academic luminaries from around the world. Yale University Library brings to the academic community the extraordinary riches of past learning, scholarship, and invention as well as a vast array of material in digital form. For centuries, the library has served to create, provide, and protect the tools that enable scholars and students to navigate this ever-expanding universe, constructing new knowledge and insights from all that we make available to them. Our challenge is to preserve these priceless resources in perpetuity, while making them discoverable and accessible through our catalogs and the innovative services of our librarians, so that readers may seek answers to questions as yet unimagined. The collected resources of this great library constitute an engine of discovery which we must faithfully convey into the future.
Yale University Library’s mission to support and enhance research, teaching, and learning at Yale and for the worldwide scholarly community through our expertise, collections, facilities, and services demands foresight and innovation, as well as steadfast commitment and fortitude. Yale’s is the third largest university library in North America, and it ranks among the leading research libraries in the world by virtue of its vast size and rich collections. The library’s collections include written matter of every kind—from books, manuscripts, and cuneiform to unique prints and posters—but they also go before and beyond the written word in many ways. Materials such as maps, photographs, sound recordings, musical scores, moving images, artworks, coins, and other items of cultural and historical importance can be found throughout the collection.
Every part of the university depends on the library: for access to its wealth of collections, its innovative teaching collaborations and support for learning, its research and reference services, and the expertise of its dedicated librarians, curators, and technical staff.