Research library

Research libraries can be either reference libraries, which do not lend their holdings, or lending libraries, which do lend all or some of their holdings. Some extremely large or traditional research libraries are entirely reference in this sense, lending none of their material; most academic research libraries, at least in the U.S., now lend books, but not periodicals or other material.

A research library is often connected to the services of the university related to scholarly communication, such as support for open access journals run by the institution and the operation of an institutional repository, as well as support for the usage of other institutions' repositories and open archives through discovery tools and academic search engines like BASE, CORE and Unpaywall.

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  Upper-level shelving inside the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, viewed from the reading room
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  The Sistine Hall of the Vatican Library, Vatican City
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  Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC
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  Shelving at the National Library of Malta

The exterior of the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University

• Academic library
• Trends in library usage
• Research Libraries Group
• JSTOR

• Saunders, Wilfred Leonard (1968). University and Research Library Studies: Some Contributions from the University of Sheffield Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science. Oxford, UK: Pergamon Press. ISBN 9780080127262. OCLC 441960.
• Young, Heartsill (1983). ALA Glossary of Library and Information Science. Chicago, IL: American Library Association. ISBN 978-0838903711. OCLC 8907224.

• Association of Research Libraries