Media Releases

U of T library system ranked in top three with Harvard and Yale

September 9, 2014

TORONTO, ON – The Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to library sys­tem has once again been ranked as one of the top three in North Amer­i­ca – after Har­vard and Yale – accord­ing to the Asso­ci­a­tion of Research Libraries (ARL). 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. “This rank­ing reflects the invest­ment made by the Uni­ver­si­ty in the Libraries to pro­vide access to out­stand­ing elec­tron­ic and print col­lec­tions and to enable expert staff and librar­i­ans to sup­port the learn­ing and research needs of our fac­ul­ty and stu­dents with lead­ing edge infor­ma­tion ser­vices and tech­nol­o­gy.”

“This year one of our top pri­or­i­ties will be to com­plete fundrais­ing and begin build­ing a state-of-the-art addi­tion to Robarts Library. The Robarts Com­mon will be a vibrant infor­ma­tion hub which will be equipped with the new kinds of tools and ser­vices required to pre­pare the next gen­er­a­tion of schol­ars to excel in the glob­al knowl­edge econ­o­my.”

The U of T library sys­tem has placed among the ARL’s top five research libraries since 2002 and is com­prised of 44 indi­vid­ual libraries that hold more than 12 mil­lion vol­umes in 341 lan­guages, mil­lions of elec­tron­ic resources in var­i­ous forms and almost 30,000 lin­ear metres of archival mate­r­i­al. More than 150,000 new print vol­umes are acquired each year and its data cen­tre hous­es more than 200 servers with a stor­age capac­i­ty of 1.5 petabytes. Through its Per­son­al Librar­i­an pro­gram, all first-year Fac­ul­ty of Arts and Sci­ence stu­dents are matched with a librar­i­an who pro­vides cus­tomized sup­port through­out the year. It is the largest research col­lec­tion in Cana­da and the third-largest aca­d­e­m­ic library in North Amer­i­ca.

“The Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to com­mu­ni­ty takes pride in the strength of our library sys­tem, which con­tin­ues to be regard­ed as one of the world’s finest. We thank and con­grat­u­late all our librar­i­ans and library staff across the three cam­pus­es for sus­tain­ing such an impor­tant resource to our teach­ing and research,” said Cheryl Regehr, Vice-Pres­i­dent and Provost at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to.

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

 ‑30-

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 |