Largest Libraries in the World by Collection Size
About This Dataset
Largest Libraries in the World by Collection Size
A library's catalogued size counts every item it holds, not just books: manuscripts, maps, recordings, photographs and periodicals all count. This chart ranks the world's largest libraries by the number of catalogued items, in millions.
Analysis
British Library in the United Kingdom is the largest library on this list with 200 million catalogued items, 1.12 times the 178 million of the Library of Congress. The 12 libraries here hold 1016 million items between them, spread across 9 countries. National libraries fill most of the chart, and the counts include manuscripts, maps, recordings and periodicals rather than books alone - which is why the totals run so far above what any shelf count would suggest. The smallest collection shown, University of California Libraries, still holds 41 million items.
Key Findings
🏆
British Library leads in Catalogued items held (millions) with 200.
📊
Average Catalogued items held (millions): 85 · median: 50.
↔️
Gap: British Library is 4.9× larger than University of California Libraries.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- Wikipedia - List of the world's largest libraries
- Coverage
- 12 entities · 12 observations
- Measure
- Catalogued items held (millions)
- Last updated
- 10 September 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
How the figures are calculated
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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