Media Releases

U of T library system again ranked in top three in North America

July 31, 2013

TORONTO, ON – The Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to has once again been ranked as one of the top three library sys­tems in North Amer­i­ca – after Har­vard and Yale – accord­ing to the Asso­ci­a­tion of Research Libraries (ARL) rank­ings. U of T was the only Cana­di­an uni­ver­si­ty in the top 10.

“We are very proud to again be ranked in the pres­ti­gious com­pa­ny of Har­vard and Yale,” said Chief Librar­i­an Lar­ry P. Alford. “I believe this is a recog­ni­tion of the work of our extra­or­di­nary staff who, with their deep knowl­edge and exper­tise, have expand­ed our elec­tron­ic resources to more than 1.5 mil­lion items, acquired extra­or­di­nary his­tor­i­cal mate­ri­als with glob­al research val­ue and devel­oped cut­ting-edge ser­vices to sup­port stu­dents and fac­ul­ty from wher­ev­er they are.”

“The Libraries’ capac­i­ty to sup­port new forms of research will also be dra­mat­i­cal­ly enhanced this com­ing year through the expan­sion of our state-of-the-art data cen­tre, which will soon be able to accom­mo­date mas­sive dig­i­ti­za­tion pro­grams and make avail­able large amounts of text data to sup­port nation­al and inter­na­tion­al col­lab­o­ra­tive research projects.”

The U of T library sys­tem has placed among the ARL’s top five research libraries since 2002–2003 and is com­prised of 44 indi­vid­ual libraries that hold more than 12 mil­lion vol­umes in 341 lan­guages and over 28,000 lin­ear metres of archival mate­r­i­al. It is the largest pub­licly fund­ed research col­lec­tion in Cana­da and the third-largest aca­d­e­m­ic library in North Amer­i­ca.

“The Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to has not only Canada’s, but one of the world’s, finest libraries. It is clear that count­less indi­vid­u­als under­stand how impor­tant this is for the nation’s teach­ing and research, as the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to’s Bound­less Cam­paign con­tin­ues to attract sig­nif­i­cant sup­port for the library. We thank those friends and bene­fac­tors, as well as the excel­lent lead­er­ship in our library sys­tem, for main­tain­ing this pre­cious resource,” said U of T Vice-Pres­i­dent and Provost Cheryl Mis­ak.

The ARL annu­al­ly ranks its mem­bers based on total expen­di­tures, mate­ri­als expen­di­tures, salary expen­di­tures and num­ber of staff.

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For more infor­ma­tion, con­tact:

Mar­garet Wall
Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Librar­i­an
Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to Libraries
Tel: (416) 978‑1757
margaret.wall@utoronto.ca

U of T Media Rela­tions Office
Tel: (416) 978‑0100
media.relations@utoronto.ca