The University Library is one of the largest public academic libraries in the United States, with over 10 million volumes and 22 million items and materials in all formats, languages, and subjects, including 9 million microforms, 90,000 serials, 148,000 audio-recordings, 12,000 films, and 650,000 maps. The extensive array of collections reflect scholarship and research in all disciplines, with some 4 million volumes on international studies. These various collections form the bulk of I-Share, the statewide library online catalog, which links the Library to more than 400 academic, public, special, regional, and school libraries in Illinois. Users at more than 40 academic libraries throughout the state may borrow books directly from the Library’s collections. Nationally and internationally, the Library’s collections are accessible through the OCLC online bibliographic database and the Internet.
Among the Library’s most notable collections are its holdings in Slavic and Eastern European history, literature, and science; music, especially Renaissance music; 17th- and 18th-century American and British literature; American, British and Irish history, including a distinguished collection of Lincolniana; French, German, and Italian literature, including world-famous Proust, Rilke, Dante, and Tasso collections; Latin American history and literature; historic and modern maps; linguistics; entomology, ornithology, botany, chemistry and mathematics; and serials across all disciplines. The Library is also world-famous for its outstanding collection of emblem books and incunabula; and collections, including personal papers, of John Milton, Marcel Proust, H.G. Wells, Carl Sandburg, and Avery Brundage of the international Olympic movement.