However, UBC Library ranked 23rd for the titles held (physical and online documents) and second in Canada, and had a materials expenditures of $13.8 million, placing it 44th.

It is a depository library for publications of the governments of British Columbia (BC), Canada, Japan and the United Nations.

Photographs (consisting of more than 18,000 rare and unique early photographs of British Columbia), the H. Colin Slim Stravinsky Collection (the largest collection of its kind in Canada, including more than 130 items documenting the work and life of Igor Stravinsky) and the Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection,[4] containing more than 25,000 rare and one-of-a-kind items relating to the discovery of BC, the development of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and Chinese immigration to Canada.

The collection includes documents, books, maps, posters, paintings, photographs, silver, glass, ceramic ware and other artifacts.

The building is located at UBC Vancouver's South Campus (in the Research Precinct) and provides 2,280 square metres of high-density collection storage.

Its holdings in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Tibetan, Persian, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Urdu and Indonesian exceed 710,000 volumes as of June 2020.

Monographs in Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Rajasthani, Assamese, Nepali and Tibetan are shelved in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.

Notable features include the first Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS) in Canada, referred to as the "library robot."

The Chung Collection, a designated national treasure, is located in the RBSC space, and focuses on the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Asian experience in Canada, and West Coast history and exploration.

In 2014, UBC Okanagan's students voted in a referendum to contribute up to $10 million toward the expansion of the campus’ Library and Learning Centre.

The renovations will add 45,000 square feet of space, more than doubling the size of the existing library.

Koerner houses humanities and social sciences, government publications, journals and microforms, and numeric data files, the Map & Atlas Collection, and the UBC Research Commons.

The library is the result of a 1984 Stauffer Foundation Grant to the Native Indian Teacher Education Program (NITEP) that provided funds to build the collection.

The library uses a British Columbia variant of the Xwi7xwa classification system, developed by Kahnawake librarian, Brian Deer, for the National Indian Brotherhood in the 1970s.