With its almost 2 million documents, the University Library is the third largest one in the capital. Until 1949 its collection interest covered works from all disciplines taught at the university, later it was limited to
- medieval and early modern times world history,
- religion and history of religion.
Since then the library has nation-wide responsibility for the collection of publications in these fields.
Furthermore the library collects and stores
- theses defended on the Eötvös Loránd University (which can be searched in the OPAC, and those written in the last few years are available full text in the institutional repository, EDIT),
- documents about the history of the university,
- outstanding works of Hungarian literature,
- all sorts of reference works, handbooks, dictionaries, scholarly works in Hungarian or in several foreign languages needed for research.
The old book collection of the library is a part of the National Cultural Heritage of Hungary and is acknowledged all over Europe. The collection includes
- 185 codices (14 of them from Bibliotheca Corviniana),
- 1200 incunabula,
- 11 000 works from the 16th,
- 15 000 from the 17th and 75 000 from the 18th century.
There are several early Hungarian language relics, medieval charters, guilds’ letters of patent, autograph manuscripts of outstanding persons, engravings, and maps in the manuscript and rarity collection.