The system includes eight of the nine libraries of the University of Florida and provides primary support to all academic programs except those served by the Lawton Chiles Legal Information Center.

All of the libraries serve all of the university's faculty and students, but each has a special mission to be the primary support of the specific colleges and degree programs with which they are primarily affiliated.

[11] The Libraries also administer the Florida Academic Repository (FLARE), a centralized shared print storage facility that houses millions of books from the State University System of Florida and the University of Miami.

Smathers attended the University of Florida's school of law and served as student body president.

[14] The University of Florida's Main Library was built in 1925 to house a growing collection of forty thousand books, numerous journals, and various documents.

[16] In 1941 the libraries automated their book circulation and fines using an IBM punch card and sorting machines.

The assembly also included the inauguration of a new addition to the main library building and a donation by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings of many of her papers and manuscripts for the creation of a Creative Writing Collection.

This was mainly done by installing terminals with access to the bibliographic utility OCLC and other online databases, along with the acquisition of its first computer programmer, and the creations of a Systems department.