Younes and Soraya Nazarian Library
The library devotes many resources to the development, preservation and digitization of special collections, such as dissertations, research publications, historical photographs of the Land of Israel, and archives of theatrical and performing arts.
Special emphasis is placed on ensuring accessibility in both the short and long term to the academic community and to the general public interested in matters of heritage preservation.
In the early 1970s, construction of the library in its current location commenced, as part of the project for establishing the university, designed by Oscar Niemeyer.
Despite the constraints and the lack of male workers for putting up shelves, maintenance and carrying loads, Shmuel Sever requested that the library move to its new quarters as scheduled.
Readers could now make use of a large, high-ceilinged reading room (which was said to be, at the time, the largest in the Middle East), whose eastern façade was composed entirely of windows facing onto the splendid view of Haifa Bay.
The reading room itself held tens of work tables and chairs, the angle of whose backrests had been selected from several models by a poll of readers.
But at the beginning of the 21st century, the library found itself too small and outdated to accommodate its growing collections and the advanced services and technologies it provided.
In 2007, Soraya and Younes Nazarian, leading members of the community of expatriate Iranian Jews in Los Angeles, made a generous donation to the university for the purpose of renovating and expanding the library, including construction of a new wing.
The Nazarians are known for their philanthropic activities on behalf of the community in a variety of fields, including the arts, health and the development of institutions of higher education in the United States and Israel.
In June 2007, Younes Nazarian received an honorary doctorate during the meeting of the university's Board of Governors, in recognition of his donation and commitment to the State of Israel and to Jews the world over.
On 3 June 2012, during the 40th annual meeting of the university's Board of Governors and in the presence of the donors, an additional festive dedication ceremony was held to mark the conclusion of the library renovation.
This transition was led by Elhanan Adler and Aviva Shichor [3] Additional milestones were the computer revolution that the library underwent from the end of the 1970s and the introduction of the Internet at the beginning of the 1990s.
A unique project of the library is the Index to Hebrew Periodicals, a multi-disciplinary tool that provides users access to academic articles as well as business and popular ones.
The Index contains citations to hundreds of thousands of articles from selected periodicals, collections and daily newspapers in many fields: Judaica, literature, education, history, archeology, the arts, architecture, medicine, law, agriculture, nature, science, technology, society and the nation.
Since its inception in 1977, the indexing project was transformed over the years from a printed format to a computerized one, and was eventually incorporated into the library services available via the Internet.
The library was the first in Israel to adopt Primo and to develop and integrate the Hebrew interface (including graphic design and text display), based on usability testing.
