University of British Columbia

The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public university with its main campus located at Point Grey, in the University Endowment Lands, a suburb directly adjoining Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and another smaller campus known as UBC Okanagan located in Kelowna, British Columbia. It also has two smaller campuses in Vancouver: its campus at Vancouver General Hospital for the medical sciences and its UBC Robson Square campus in the downtown area of Vancouver for part-time credit and non-credit programs.

The University library

UBC Library is the second largest research library in Canada. There are twenty-one branches and divisions at UBC and at other locations, including three branches at teaching hospitals (St.Paul's, Vancouver Hospital and Health Sciences Centre, and Children's and Women's Health Centre of BC) and one at UBC's Robson Square campus in downtown Vancouver. Plans are also underway to establish a library at the Great Northern Way Campus on the Finning Lands.

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The Library's collections are large and diverse, and include four million books and journals, 4.9 million microforms, more than 1.5 million maps, videos and other multimedia materials and over 33,500 subscriptions. UBC Library has the largest biomedical collection in Western Canada and the largest collection of Asian Language materials in the country. It is a depository library as well for publications of the governments of BC, Canada, Japan and the United Nations.

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Collections of special and rare materials include the H. Colin Slim Stravinsky Collection, the largest collection of its kind in Canada; and the Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection, containing more than 25,000 rare and one-of-a-kind items relating to the discovery of BC, the development of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and Chinese immigration to Canada.

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Library branches

• Asian Library: The Asian Library houses the largest research collection in Asian languages in Canada, its holdings in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, South Asian and Indonesian exceeding 500,000 volumes. Special materials include the valuable Puban collection (蒲坂藏書樓藏書), Swann collection, Song Xuepeng collection (宋學鵬藏書), Jing Yi Zhai (景頤齋藏書), Japanese government publications, research materials on Chinese Canadian settlement in British Columbia and Pearl Delta Area as well as Japanese Canadian studies collections. Its rare book collection, mainly from the Puban collection, ranks 5th in North America. The Chinese collection ranked 11th in North America in number of volumes at the time of publication of Endymion Wilkinson's _Chinese History: A Manual_ in 2000.
• Main Library: After a recent renovation of the third-floor atrium in 2001, the Chapman Reading Commons http://www.library.ubc.ca/chapmanlearningcommons/ and the Chung Collection of immigration documents http://www.library.ubc.ca/chung/ were created. In autumn of 2003, one-third of it (formerly Ridington Computing Room, Fine Arts Library, and the Design Art Gallery at the basement) was demolished in preparation for new glass-walled study areas, the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre http://www.ikebarberlearningcentre.ubc.ca/, to be completed in 2005.
• Walter Koerner Library: built in 1997, adding to the Sedgewick Library. Koerner Library is almost entirely dedicated to the humanities and is home to 800,000 volumes. Its postmodern architecture (most walls are see-through glass) contrasts the Gothic revival design of Main Library, which is located across from it through a plaza that contains a fountain and the 33.8-metre Leon Ladner Bell Tower (ringing every half an hour, sometimes with classical music). The Main Library contains the contents of the former Sedgewick library in its lower levels.