Mansfield College Library holds over 30,000 volumes which   embrace two distinct collections.

The undergraduate collections are housed in three libraries including separate Law and Theology Libraries and cover all subjects offered for study at Mansfield.

From its theological foundation there is an inheritance of research material for the study of English and Welsh Nonconformity, a collection of eighteenth and nineteenth century books and a small but significant antiquarian collection.

An extensive College Archive, which includes administrative, architectural and photographic records, is also housed in the Library together with the Archive of Spring Hill College Birmingham and early Reports from the Mansfield House Settlement in the East End of London.

The Main Library rests under the spreading slopes of a great pitched roof with attractive stencilled panels which are ornamented with scrolls and Latin mottoes and studded with carved bosses. The Library has the appearance of a medieval tithe barn with a gallery and reading bays below.  Fitted throughout with carved oak, mythical creatures, flowers and fruit can be seen in carvings above the book shelves in the reading bays which also incorporate the original oak tables.

The portraits in the libraries are from a collection of fifty portraits presented to the College in 1894; they are of clergymen ejected from the Church of England by the Act of Uniformity in 1662 most of whom became founder members of the Nonconformist churches.

View from an alcove in the Main Library