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Our History
Penn State's first library collection consisted of approximately 1,500 
volumes in agriculture and the sciences and was housed in Old Main, along 
with most other college facilities. The nineteenth-century library was 
considered an auxiliary to study and by 1888 was open six hours a day. By 
the turn of the century the library had grown to nearly 20,000 volumes. The 
overcrowding was finally relieved by construction of the Carnegie Library, 
a gift of steel magnate and college trustee Andrew Carnegie.

The library moved to what is now the Carnegie Building in 1904. The 50,000-
volume-capacity building had the beginnings of some special collections, 
including government documents and the Penn State Room. Departmental 
libraries in a number of the sciences also had been established by this 
time, and some continue today as our branch libraries. The collection 
eventually outgrew the building, which by 1940 contained three times as 
many volumes as the number for which the building was designed.

A new main building, now Pattee Library, was constructed as part of a 
multibuilding Public Works Administration-General State Authority project 
in the 1937-40 period. As Pattee Library has grown, three major additions 
have been made, the most recent being the East Wing in 1973. Although the 
holdings of the University Libraries had grown to some 80,000 volumes by 
the mid-1960s, it was recognized by the University that this was 
insufficient to support a major research-oriented university, and budgetary 
support for the University Libraries increased rapidly. The cataloged 
collection now exceeds 3.2 million items. More than 80,000 volumes are 
added to the collection annually. In 1992, a former supermarket was 
renovated as a storage site for less frequently used library resources, 
marking the third annex that the University Libraries has opened in the 
last ten years.

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