A collection of books in Karl G. Maeser's office served as the first library at Brigham Young Academy.

[6]: 32 English professor Alice Louise Reynolds helped raise funds to purchase over 1,000 books for the library.

Students would find books they wanted in the catalog, and library pages would retrieve them.

[6]: 108  This policy changed in 1958, when gifts became subject to a consultation with the Director of Libraries,[6]: 117  S. Lyman Tyler.

In his time as director from 1954 to 1966, Tyler met Keyes Metcalf at a seminar for library administrators.

[15] 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.

[16] The HBLL was again expanded and remodeled in the mid– and late–1990s using donated funds,[17] adding 234,000 square feet (21,700 m2),[18] technology classrooms, an auditorium, and a digitization center.

[24] The library renamed their NOTIS cataloging system in 1984 to the Brigham Young University Information Network (BYLINE), and ran it on a mainframe computer located in the James E. Talmage Building.

[26][27] A word processing center in the library made 25 computers available to students at the rate of $1 per hour in 1996.

The Horizon system allowed users to access online catalogs from other libraries, and used a client-server model.

[35] Prior to this program, Mary Elizabeth Downey taught a six-week class on the use of libraries.

The juvenile literature department opened its Lloyd Alexander Collection in January 2010, featuring items from the author's home office for students and researchers to access.

[41] Notable items from the collection include a 1967 Bible illustrated by Salvador Dalí, a 13th-century Vulgate, a first edition Book of Mormon, and the papers of Cecil B. DeMille and Helen Foster Snow.

The collection includes a Welsh library originally sponsored in 1951 by the National Gymanfa Association of the United States and Canada.