One of the largest German academic libraries, it has numerous national as well as international projects in librarianship and in the provision of research infrastructure services.

Peter and Paul's Church, Göttingen, has been made into an exhibition and lecture center through adaptive reuse and reconstruction.

It also operates the Göttingen University Press, which has been expanding since its foundation in 2003 and is committed to the Open access principle.

Within the Specialised Information Services Programme funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), it operates the specialised information services Mathematics (since 2015, with the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB Hannover)), Anglo-American Culture (since 2016, with the Library of the J. F. Kennedy Institute of the Free University of Berlin), Geosciences of the Solid Earth (since 2016, with the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ Potsdam)) and Finno-Ugric / Uralic Languages, Literature and Culture (since 2017).

It soon was considered one of the leading research libraries in Germany, pioneering cataloging systems (then in large bound volumes).