Founded in August, 1954, SHNU Library grew out of the library of Shanghai Teachers Training College Library, and was renamed 2 years later as Shanghai Normal University Library. In October, 1986, with the completion of the new library building, the total area of the library amounts to over 11,000 square meters.
In 2000, Liberal Arts General Reading Room, Multimedia Reading Room, Audiovisual Reading Room, Thread-bound Ancient Books Stack and Ancient Books Reference Room were set up on the 1st to 3rd floor of the newly-built Wenyuan Building. The university had the libraries on both Xuhui and Fengxian campuses combined in Feburary, 2003.
Up to now, the whole library covers an area of 32,968 square meters, including 9 departments, an executive office and a center to better serve the readers.
The libraries are featured with:1. Complete categories of arts, literature and sciences which can generally satisfy the needs of teaching and research for both teachers and students;
2. Rich resources of Shanghai chorography, such as annals of Fu, county, and town of Shanghai suburbs, political, historic, economic, cultural and educational data of contemporary and modern Shanghai, and collections of poems and essays about historic figures of Shanghai;
3. Abundant storage of translated versions of Chinese contemporary writers, and about 95 percent of all the works of such well-known literary tycoons as Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, Lao She, and Ba Jin; around 200 different kinds of chief literary journals from May 4th Movement (in the year 1919) to the founding of the People’s Republic of China (in 1949);
4. A store of more than 1,800 local chronicles, 1,500 classic books, 5,000 valuable editions of ancient collections, and 2,000 searching indexes;
5. A special collection of Chinese and overseas reference books for teaching primary and middle school students.
