The University Library system includes over 7 million volumes in 19 libraries on the campus in Ann Arbor, with collection strengths ranging from papyri to social protest materials. In addition, the university is home to dozens of large and small libraries and reading rooms independent of the University Library system. All libraries in the system are open to the public, and there are public workstations for accessing licensed electronic resources.

The original home of JSTOR, the University Library has been a pioneer in text encoding and mass digitization, putting public domain resources online since the early 1990s through the Humanities Text Initiative and creating large-scale digital collections like Making of America, made searchable using the XPAT search engine and homegrown middleware, released as open source through the Digital Library Extension Service (DLXS). More recently, the Digital Library Production Service has focused on developing the software infrastructure for Deep Blue, one of the largest institutional repositories in the world, and HathiTrust, co-founded by the University of Michigan Library.

Most active text encoding in the University Library is done as part of the Text Creation Partnership, a not-for-profit organization based in the University Library for the encoding of selected content of significant scholarly interest. The Scholarly Publishing Office also adds to the library collection by publishing born-digital content, often as encoded text.

In March 2009 the University of Michigan Press became part of the University Library (and is now part of MPublishing), and in June 2009 the Digital Media Commons also became part of the Library. These changes will doubtless increase the synergy between the operations of these closely allied campus units and existing Library operations.

See the University Library website for more information.