The inviting F.W. Olin Library houses a collection of 225,000 volumes and other media supporting the curricular needs of the College, with special emphases on literature, history, women's studies, art, and music.

The interior of the building was designed with comfort and accessibility in mind and includes 280 study and workstations of appealing variety, a listening-viewing room with fully equipped audiovisual stations, and a seminar room. Computer workstations are available throughout the Library to access Library databases, the Internet, email or word processing. Library facilities are fully wheelchair-accessible, and special services for disabled students are available.

The Library is also home to the Special Collections of 12,000 volumes and 10,000 manuscripts, including Shakespeare's First Folio, a Mozart manuscript, and an edition of Alice in Wonderland illustrated by Salvador Dali. Housed in the Heller Rare Book Room, the collections include printed books from the 15th century to the present, as well as the Mills College Collection. It is also the home of the Mills Center for the Book, a forum for cultural, literary, and aesthetic heritage of the book.

The Library is open 88 hours a week during the semester. Reference librarians are available until 9 pm most weekdays and until 6 pm Sundays to help students organize their research efforts and make the best use of Library resources. Library staff also teach students how to find and use bibliographic and electronic resources pertinent to specific needs or assignments.

The Library's web-based catalog, MINERVA, is accessible throughout the Library or via the Internet at http://library.mills.edu. The Library offers more than 60 databases, including Academic Search (an interdisciplinary periodicals database, which indexes and abstracts 3,100 journals, 1,500 of which are full-text), Lexis-Nexis, PsycINFO, SocioFile, MEDLINE, ERIC, MLA Bibliography, Contemporary Women's Issues, and Britannica Online, Biography Resource Center, Science Direct, among others. All databases are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week via the Library's website (from on- or off-campus) and give students access to a larger world of periodical literature than those titles held by the College. The catalog of other libraries, e.g., Melvyl (UC campuses), and access to the Internet are available as well. If we do not have the article needed, we can obtain some items by interlibrary loan from other institutions.