The Main Library was founded in 1921 and moved to the present site in 1987. It's building,since being enlarged in 2001 and 2002,expanded the floors area to 22,000 square meters. There are 4,500 seats offered for the readers in the building.Xiamen University invests dozens of millions yuan in recent years in purchasing the library's resources. The library's collection increases rapidly at 100,000 volumes per year and hasapproximated to 2,500,000 volumes totally by the end of 2003, including 500,000 volumes of foreign languages materials. As a comprehensive academic library, it possesses a systematical collection of materials for some distinctive subjects such as biology, chemistry, computer science, economics, history, law, linguistics, management, mathematics, mechanical & electronic engineering, oceanography, philosophy, physics, politics, and those materials on Southeast Asian Study and Taiwan Study.
The Library, as an information center, including it's branch libraries of Law, Economics & Management, Humanities, and that of the Eastern Campus, together with the reference rooms of some schools, departments and institutes, have constituted the Public Information Resources Supply System of the university, the services of which have greatly accelerated the teaching and research progress.
The Library has paid great attention to the digital library programmes, which started in 2000. Nowadays, over 300 items of servers, workstations, terminals and some other instruments enable the library to offer its users with various services such as Interlibrary Loan, Database Mirror-Site Service, Novelty Search, Online Database Retrieval, and those traditional library services such as collection circulating, information searching and Reading are operating on the base of the advanced network environment. More than 40 famous international academic databases could be accessed by any campus LAN users all the time.
Being one of the members of the China Academic Information System (CALIS) and equipped with the advanced instruments mentioned above, the library will make even greater contributions to the development of Xiamen University and local community as well.
The Library has several divisions: Acquisition, Administration,Cataloging,Circulation,I nformation Reference and Information Techniques. Most of them are offering services from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. everyday.
