Skip to main
Skip to main
University-wide Navigation

UK Libraries stands at the heart of the academic enterprise. We are proud to serve the University of Kentucky by providing a foundational support to the growth and sustenance of UK’s diverse community of learners, teachers, and scholars, and to Kentuckians all across the Commonwealth.

We stand as the backdrop of all intellectual and scholarly pursuits undertaken across the University. It is our mission to empower learners to achieve their goals by facilitating the creation and sharing of knowledge, providing world-class services, resources, and spaces, and offering support to the University’s rich and multifaceted community through the comprehensive expertise of our librarians, archivists, and staff members.

Developing & Managing Collections

UK Libraries thoughtfully collects, carefully preserves, and accurately describes and catalogs vast amounts of information. Standing at the helm of a wide domain of information resources and knowledge products, UK Libraries is tasked with giving shape and meaning to both the raw materials and the finished products of the research enterprise and assuring the scholarly integrity and reliability of the materials we furnish.

We develop and manage collections in order to serve the wide range of knowledge areas across all of the University’s colleges, from undergraduate to postdoctoral levels, as well as all academic and professional programs, specialized and interdisciplinary fields, and in support of emerging research initiatives and University-determined research priorities.

Providing Pathways & Improving Accessibility

Our librarians and archivists serve as agents of accessibility and navigational guides into our vast information ecosystem. We ensure that all of our users can access precisely the materials they need, across formats, both inside and outside of our holdings, and deliver needed resources in the required mode to users located on campus or anywhere around the world. 

We also ensure the navigability of our collections and the accessibility of our materials by building and maintaining the technical infrastructures necessary for a research-intensive institution. Our technical systems, together with the expertise of our librarians, provide pathways to all of our information resources and make certain that our materials are not only findable, but also properly situated within their context. We have been aided in these efforts by the support of many grants and partnerships

Scholarly Communication

One of UK Libraries’ core functions is supporting and promoting University’s intellectual capital and facilitating scholarly communication both within the University and across the broader community. To this end, we administer and grow UK’s institutional repository, UKnowledge, assuring the permanent global accessibility, timely sharing, and safe storage of UK's scholarship, data, and creative works. 

Situated at the crossroads of the research process, we also help the University stay current with transitions occurring in the production, dissemination, and retrieval of information. We are able not only to accommodate these changes in informational and institutional environments, but also to power them and lead the way in seeking out ever-expanding sources of information,  developing novel modes of research, and leading the charge in discovering more democratic, open-sourced, and world-bettering processes of knowledge sharing and dissemination.

Information Literacy & Research Support

UK Libraries supports our users and the University by fostering skills of inquiry through the promotion of information literacy. By helping our users navigate a perplexing information environment, ascertain the value of the information they find, and navigate the fields of knowledge to which they contribute, we partner with faculty to inform and nurture new generations of learners, teachers, and researchers and affirm the value of sustained inquiry.

We also provide services and resources for every step of the research process. We are proud to work alongside all of our users, whether they are writing a research paper for the first time or putting the finishing touches on a years-long project. 

Library & University

UK Libraries is both the symbolic center and the communal common ground of the University. A hub of interaction, place of gathering, and pillar and foundation of intellectual activity, UK Libraries plays an integral role in supporting the core mission of the University. We direct our efforts and resources into facilitating the capacity of all of our users to discover what they seek, to expand the range and depth of the work they create, and to improve their capacity to connect with communities around the world. Across fields and disciplines, the library is an essential co-creator of the academic enterprise: the complementary strengths of University and Libraries combine to produce a result that neither could achieve on their own. By providing ever-expanding access to quality information, we are proud to contribute to the intellectual vitality of the UK community and the Commonwealth.