Be proud, Penn Staters. Your library is the 8th-best in North America, according to the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Library Investment Index.

Other libraries ranked near Penn State’s? Those of mildly significant academic institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

The ARL Library Investment Index measures the relative size of libraries by their total expenditures, salaries and wages for professional staff, total library materials expenditures, and number professional plus support staff. To see how Penn State stacks up in these categories, you can view the ARL’s analytics here.

Penn State was previously ranked No. 10 in North America before moving up two places to its current #8 spot. For reference, here are the universities with top ten libraries according to ARL’s most recent Library Investment Index:

1. Harvard University
2. Yale University
3. University of Toronto
4. Columbia University
5. University of Michigan
6. University of California, Berkeley
7. New York University
8. Pennsylvania State University
9. Princeton University
10. Cornell University

About the Author

Bobby Chen

Writer and photographer, helping tell the many stories of the Penn State community.