Part of the major linguistics collection come from the private libraries of well-known 19th and 20th-century scholars such as Abel Hovelacque, Joseph Vendryes, and others.

Its aim is to buy and make available books and knowledge to researchers but also to indicate the resources at a national scale: thus, the library is in charge of the "sociology" section of the Bulletin Signalétique (a kind of bibliography of French science articles) at the beginning of the 70s.

[1] The library reopened at the end of 2006,[5] at the same time that Paris Descartes Social Sciences Faculty moved from the Sorbonne to its new location in Rue des Saints-Pères.

[6] In 2008, the former "Friends of Centre d'Études Sociologiques'Society" (SACES) has entrusted to the library some photographic portraits of sociologists : Raymond Aron, André Davidovitch, Émile Durkheim, Georges Friedmann, Louis Gernet, Alain Girard, Marcel Granet, Georges Gurvitch, Maurice Halbwachs, Robert Hertz, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Marcel Mauss, Pierre Naville, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Jean Stoetzel.

Part of this collection is available on the open archive MediHAL But it is also an experimental library for new tool for scientific information circulation in France and abroad.