The Library Division, with more than eighty thousand volumes, comprises one of the leading special collections of published Western Americana in the world. The Library contains a general stack collection, known as the Frank Phillips Collection, plus eleven smaller private libraries that focus on specialized topics:

• The Henry B. Bass Collection on Abraham Lincoln and the U.S. Civil War
• The J. M. Bell Collection on Alaska and Arctic history
• The B. M. Bower Collection of western fiction
• The Glen Bradley Collection of OU Press books
• The Norman Brillhart Collection on Indian wars in the Trans-Mississippi West and General George Armstrong Custer
• The Edward Everett Dale Collection of western history and Oklahoma history
• The Alan Farley Collection of Kansas and Oklahoma history, and the U.S. Civil War
• The Frank and Patty Grass Collection of OU Press books
• The Robert O. Fay and Helen S. Fay Collection on the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair
• The John W. Morris Collection on Oklahoma geography and history, and U.S./world geography
• The Fred Schonwald Collection on the American Southwest and American Indian art

The Library Division has extensive holdings of scholarly journals in the field of western history, as well as a complete set of Reports and Bulletins of the Bureau of American Ethnology, and a collection of contemporary Native American newspapers.