[2] The Collections' specialist areas include items relating to the history of New Zealand and the Pacific, with specific emphasis on the Otago and Southland Regions.

Dr. Thomas Hocken was too ill to attend the official opening on 23 March 1910 (the 62nd anniversary of the founding of Dunedin), and died just two months later.

It was reconsolidated on another site in 1998 in the former Otago Co-operative Dairy Company factory on Anzac Avenue, east of the main campus.

The personal and public papers of many important Otago people are also present in the library's collections, including those of the writers James K. Baxter and R. A. K. Mason, as well as the political writings of many of the community's leaders.

The following Hocken Collection's holdings have been recognised as items of recorded heritage which have national significance by UNESCO Memory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand Ngā Mahara o te Ao.