Welcome to our Library and Archives

Our collections are the lifeblood enabling learning, teaching, and research at New College, Oxford.

We aim continually to adapt and improve our service offering to support the needs of the College and its members, and those of scholars worldwide.

If your visit is for a library enquiry, among other things for our rare and early printed books, or any of the College’s manuscripts, medieval to modern—including those listed in H. O. Coxe, Catalogus codicum MSS. qui in collegiis aulisque Oxoniensibus hodie adservantur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1852)—please visit our Library pages. 

If your visit is for an archival enquiry (material relating to the College and its estates from their foundation to the present day, typically administrative and biographical records, unpublished letters, photographs), please visit our Archives pages.

Whatever the reason for your visit to our website, I do hope you will find time to peruse the Library Manuscripts Gallery and Rare Books Gallery, and the Archives Gallery, where a selection of images from our celebrated collections of illuminated manuscripts, early printed books, and archives are on show for you to enjoy.
 

Christopher Skelton-Foord

Librarian
MA (Cantab), MLitt, MBA, MA (LIS), PhD

christopher.skelton-foord@new.ox.ac.uk

Postal address:

The Library and Archives
New College
University of Oxford
Holywell Street
Oxford  OX1 3BN
UK

Telephone: +44 (0)1865 279580

Locating the Library and Archives:

Our location can be found on the Map of Libraries in Oxford 
—New College Library, which also houses our Archives & Records Reading Room, is number 76 on the map—
as well as via Google Maps.

We provide a reader-focused library service, responsive to and serving the needs of the students and academics of New College, Oxford.  At its heart is an attractive two-storey library building with a working library of some 70,000 modern texts, where we offer generous borrowing privileges, individual and group study seating areas, and extensive opening hours.  Collections support learning, research, and teaching across all academic disciplines within the College.  Our Library Guide provides a plan of our upper and lower floors and gives the classification system we use to arrange books on the shelves by subject.  The University of Oxford has the largest and finest academic library system in the UK, and the substantial academic e-resources provided by the University are available to New College members.  Library staff are happy to help you make the most of all the electronic and printed collections available.

We administer and care for extensive and rich archives—which bear national Archive Service Accreditation status.  They comprise administrative records of the College since 1379, title deeds and manorial records of its estates in twenty-eight counties, and more recent papers and special collections amassed by or relating to some of its members.  Our earliest documents date from the 11th century.  There is a regular ingress of modern records from across the College and its various departments, some of which are held temporarily while some are transferred for permanent retention within our archive.

We are the curators and custodians of an internationally renowned collection of rare books and manuscripts to which we add significant items received via donation or purchase.  More manuscripts survive from the medieval library of New College than from that of any other Oxford or Cambridge college, and we hold what is probably the finest collection of medieval manuscripts of any of the Oxford colleges—and one of the university’s great collections.  New College Library also holds more incunabula (fifteenth-century European imprints) than any other undergraduate college at Oxford.  Our outstanding special collections are used by the wider scholarly community of researchers world-wide.

For news, and to see beautiful images from our world-famous special collections, follow us on X, Instagram, and Facebook.

Read about the contents and history of our rich collections from our scholarly open-access e-journal New College Notes, watch our video series ‘Curators’ Choice’, and learn about our institutional life and work over the course of 2023.

On application to the Librarian, we provide external readers, as well as New College members, with access to our outstanding collections of rare books and manuscripts.  Provision is limited, so please contact him as far in advance as possible.

We invite all friends, supporters, and alumni of New College to help us, through the New College Library Fund. Your generosity will help us enhance and add to our modern collections, to our outstanding special collections, and to our vital digitisation and conservation work, for the benefit of students and scholars of today, and future generations too.