The Harold B. Lee Library (HBLL) is the main academic library of Brigham Young University (BYU) located in Provo, Utah. The library started as a small collection of books in the president's office in 1876 before moving in 1891. The Heber J. Grant Library building was completed in 1925, and in 1961 the library moved to the newly constructed J. Reuben Clark Library where it stands today. That building was renamed to the Harold B. Lee Library in 1974.
The library was significantly expanded in the 1990s, providing new individual and group study rooms and a special vault area for the L. Tom Perry Special Collections Library. In 2016, the library contained over 4.7 million books, 10.6 million total materials, and served over 10,000 patrons each day. The library was ranked by the Princeton Review within the top three university libraries in the United States four times: in 2004, 2007, 2012, and 2023.
History
A collection of books in Karl G. Maeser's office served as the first library at Brigham Young Academy. In 1891, the library moved to a room in the Education Building in the lower campus, which expanded to include Room D about 1906. George Q. Cannon and Reed Smoot helped to acquire documents from the U.S. Department of the Interior and congressional documents. A fire in 1884 destroyed at least forty volumes of the collection. Students rarely checked out books in the early 1900s, generally studying books in the library instead. The Dewey Decimal Classification system was introduced to the library in 1908.
English professor Alice Louise Reynolds helped raise funds to purchase over 1,000 books for the library. She was the faculty chair of a committee to establish the library from 1906 to 1925. The library contained 29,592 volumes by 1923—almost half of them donated—and students had to stand in the library for lack of study space Reynolds' fan club donated over 10,000 volumes in the 1930s. By 1946, the library contained 138,500 volumes of books.
The Heber J. Grant Library was completed in 1925. In the Grant Library, reference books were placed on shelves surrounding the study area, with the rest of the library's holdings on shelves in the book room. Students would find books they wanted in the catalog, and library pages would retrieve them.
The library increased the volume of acquisitions during the 1930s and 1940s, and gifts of books were indiscriminately accepted. This policy changed in 1958, when gifts became subject to a consultation with the Director of Libraries, S. Lyman Tyler. In his time as director from 1954 to 1966, Tyler met Keyes Metcalf at a seminar for library administrators. Metcalf was the former director of the Harvard Library, and consulted with Tyler about the plans for BYU's new library. BYU commissioned Lorenzo Snow Young to make the plans for addition.
The J. Reuben Clark Library was completed in 1961. The library's collection reached 500,000 volumes in 1965, and one million volumes by 1971. The name of library changed in 1974 from the J. Reuben Clark Library to the Harold B. Lee Library to avoid confusion with the J. Reuben Clark Law School. Harold B. Lee was the 11th president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
A six-story addition was completed in 1976, doubling the library's physical space and increasing the library's seating capacity from 2,500 to 4,500. The addition had moveable walls, integrated student study spaces into the stacks, added group study rooms, and included a vault for archival materials. Art professor and artist Franz M. Johansen created four cast stone panels used to decorate the south entrance of the library and representing four areas of human knowledge.
The HBLL was again expanded and remodeled in the mid– and late–1990s using donated funds, adding , technology classrooms, an auditorium, and a digitization center. After the expansion, parts of the old library were remodeled, and the south entrance was closed. A new south entrance was opened in 2015.
From 2001 to 2011, the Interlibrary Loan program processed 500,000 requests. The library contained over 4.7 million books and served an average of 10,191 patrons a day during 2016. Single-user study rooms were added in 2017, and construction started on a family-friendly study room.