[4] Originating in 1701 with the gift of several dozen books to a new “Collegiate School," the library's collection now contains approximately 14.9 million volumes housed in fifteen university buildings and is the third-largest academic library system in North America and the second-largest housed on a singular campus.

The library is also a member of Borrow Direct, allowing patrons to check out volumes from major American research universities.

Although New Haven Colony founder John Davenport began collecting books for a college library in New Haven in the 1650s, the college is said to have been founded by the gift of “forty folios” in Branford, Connecticut by its ten founding Congregational ministers.

Among the contributors were leading scientists including Isaac Newton, John Woodward, and Edmond Halley, who sent copies of their own tracts among their donations.

[11] The Victorian Gothic building, designed by Henry Austin and considered an extravagance in its day, was modeled after Gore Hall, the library of Harvard College.

As the collection surpassed one million volumes in the 20th century, it became clear that the library would need a new building.

In 1917, a $17-million bequest from John W. Sterling, stipulating Yale build "at least one enduring, useful and architecturally beautiful edifice," provided the means.

[13][14] Beginning under the librarianship of Andrew Keogh in 1924, the library undertook a purposeful program of collecting rare books, personal papers, and archival works.

English professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker mounted a campaign among Yale alumni to purchase or donate valuable items, and early gifts included a complete copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the papers of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, and the papers of James Boswell.

The Sterling library is also home to the largest collection of Benjamin Franklin papers in the world, which it received as a gift in 1935 from William Smith Mason, of the Yale class of 1888, and is considered the largest and most valuable collection of materials ever given to the library.

The library's largest building, Sterling Memorial Library, contains about four million volumes in the humanities, social sciences, area studies, as well as several special collections projects and the department of Manuscripts and Archives.