Auraria Library

Auraria Library is an academic library located in downtown Denver, Colorado. It provides academic resources and research experiences to students, staff, and faculty at the University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver), the Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSU Denver), and the Community College of Denver (CCD) on the Auraria Higher Education Center (AHEC) campus, also called the Auraria Campus. The Library is administratively operated by CU Denver and occupies a building owned by the State of Colorado.

The Auraria Library fulfills its tri-institutional mission through building collections, delivering services, providing technology, and offering spaces for academic resource discovery, evaluation, interpretation, and usage. The unique shared services model of this mutual facility offer considerable efficiencies to State of Colorado taxpayers.

More than 25,000 student users enter the gates each week during the academic year – for a gate count approaching one million visitors annually. The Auraria Library website receives upwards of 23,000 unique visitors monthly when classes are in session.

About one in five students in college in Colorado attend classes on the Auraria Campus. The combined tri-institutional census for fall 2012 reports 45,062 students attending the three institutions. The three institutions have combined populations of 15,903 minority students from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, which represents thirty-five percent of the total student population. Seventy-six percent of the graduates remain in the Denver Metropolitan area, contributing to its economic and civic vitality.