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Today's Collection

Today's collection includes about 30,000 dental titles including books, over 200 dental journals, reference materials, yearbooks, thesis, newsletters, past exams, study aids, videos and more. In addition, the print is supplemented by many electronic resources by University of Toronto Libraries. The online include textbooks, many dental journals, drug databases, article databases, evidence-based practice online tools, and more.

In addition, in 2011, 375 from the dentistry historical collection items were scanned and made available online through the Internet Archive. Fragile or extremely rare dental books are housed in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.

In 2015, in order to make more room for study space, we began to archive much of our print collection. After sending almost about 18,000 volumes of books and journals to the library remote storage space - UTL Downsview, as of November 2017, there remains about 9,000 volumes of collections: containing over 4,600 titles of print monographs and journals on site, with additional resources housed in the Gerstein Science Information Centre. Our dentistry collection is one of the largest in North America.

Our Head Librarian continues to carefully select items to add to our collection regularly. Whenever possible the online is selected for subscription or purchase to allow our students, staff and faculty the accessibility to access the materials 24/7. 

Some highlights of the collection from 2010 to present include the following:

  • 2010: The librarians undertake a massive project to inventory all books at the library. Many missing, damaged, uncatalogued items are found and records corrected. 
  • 2011: Digitization of the Historical collection begins, thanks to UofT Libraries teaming up with Internet Archive. Over 300 items are digitized and made available via Internet Archive. 
  • 2015-2018: Much of the book and journal collection is sent to UofT Libraries Downsview, our archive storage. This included anything that has not been checked out in previous 10 years, any duplications, any print periodicals that are also available online. The print collection is reduced from about 30,000 items to about 9,000 items onsite.
  • Pandemic: Like other libraries our current collection is short on print items from 2020-2022 due to the pandemic closures. Essential print items are being backfilled, but for the most part, we continue to concentrate on online items only.