The Scientific Library of al-Farabi Kazakh National University (KazNU) was founded and began its functioning with the foundation of the university in 1934. The Scientific Library of al-Farabi KazNU is a cultural and spiritual centre for students, masters, professors-teaching and for the whole educational academic staff. The Scientific Library collects the fund of textbooks, monographs, classical works of fiction and poetry, unique samples of rare books, manuscripts of XVII-XIX centuries and there are more than 250,000 copies of periodicals.

Now, the Scientific Library of KazNU is one of the oldest and largest university libraries in the Republic of Kazakhstan. At present the fund of the Scientific library of KazNU exceeds of more than 2 mln printed units, and yearly about 50-60 thousands of new copies of literature are enriched to the library. The amount of the readers in the Scientific Library is 20 thousand, they are not only students but professors-teaching staff, scientific workers, educational academic staff and other categories of personnel of the university. The Scientific Library has the wide branches of library affiliates at their disposal and reading rooms, which are situated at all educational buildings of the university. There are 1192 seats at the reading rooms. More than 900 thousands of readers are registries every year by visiting the library.

The library gives out to the readers more than 2 mln. copies of books, journals and newspapers and subscribe more than 850 titles of Kazakhstan and Russian periodicals.

The Scientific Library takes the leading place in the Republic of Kazakhstan by autoimmunization and involving new information technologies to the work of library-bibliographic processes, which have been actively introduced since 1990.

The Scientific Library entered to the history of web-sites of Kazakhstan, as one of the first, introducing it’s electronic catalog in Internet.

The achievements of the library were awarded more than once by different diplomas, as diploma of Association of universities of the Republic of Kazakhstan, diploma of Information Consortium of libraries of Kazakhstan and others, for quality of servicing of readers, organization of working and involving of new information technologies.

The Scientific Library answer the requirements of XXI century. Today is realizing the most modern projects, which is arising the status of the library in the society, making it the present centre of information and culture.

The mission of the Scientific Library is –

- to pursue an aim to provide students and professors-teaching staff with unlimited access to all types of information, to national and world informational resources, as traditionally and electronically.

- the regular informational support of scientifical and educational process, assistance for scientifically-research work of the university.

- the assistance for cultural development of person, dissemination of ideas of friendship, patriotism, harmony and agreement among peoples.