Harold B. Lee Library

The Harold B. Lee Library (HBLL) is the main academic library of Brigham Young University (BYU) located in Provo, Utah. The library started as a small collection of books in the president's office in 1876 before moving in 1891. The Heber J. Grant Library building was completed in 1925, and in 1961 the library moved to the J. Reuben Clark Library. The library's current name was adopted in 1974.The library was significantly expanded in the 1990s, providing new individual and group study rooms and a special vault area for the L. Tom Perry Special Collections Library. In 2016, the library contained over 4.7 million books and served over 10,000 patrons each day. The HBLL was ranked by the Princeton Review within the top three university libraries in the United States three times: in 2004, 2007, and 2012.HistoryA collection of books in Karl G. Maeser’s office served as the first library at Brigham Young Academy. In 1891, the library moved to a room in the Education Building in the lower campus, which expanded to include Room D about 1906. George Q. Cannon and Reed Smoot helped to acquire documents from the U.S. Department of the Interior and congressional documents. A fire in 1884 destroyed at least forty volumes of the collection. Students rarely checked out books in the early 1900s, generally studying books in the library instead. The Dewey Decimal Classification system was introduced to the library in 1908.