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The vatican library possesses more than one hundred and fifty thousand volumes in its various manuscript collections but also it has more than one million six hundred thousand ancient and modern printed volumes. In addition to manuscripts inherited from the monastic, medieval and Humanistic periods, signed documents and papyri dating from late Antiquity are also stored there.
The Library's storage facilities for printed volumes take the form of six long corridors while the reading rooms are located in the underground floors of the vatican museums. It is a library intended for the study of manuscripts and ancient printed volumes. The seat of the first vatican library, founded by Nicholas V was different from the current one. The library was located on the ground floor of the renaissance section of the papal palace, which stands beside St Peters basilica. At the end of the 15th century, more than three thousand manuscripts ( latin, greek and Eastern ), were added and placed in an orderly way in four rooms.
Like the tomb of saint Peter beneath the great fourth century basilica that bore his name, the vatican library of Nicholas V stood simultaneously as a memorial to the ancient Rome and as a foundation stone for the city's rebirth, challenging fifteenth-century believers to make Rome a Christian capital. Within each room, the manuscripts seem to have been organized along the new lines favored by humanists: philosophy, law, poetry and theology, carrying out and explicit mission to reconcile Christian faith with the various fields of ancient and modern knowledge in the belief that they all had been essential in the creation of Rome.
The increase in the number of manuscripts, however, had become such that the Library's accommodation became inadequate.
At the end of the 16th century, pope Sixtus V ( 1585 -1590) built a new, larger site for the library, the Salone Sistino over the stairway that divided the Belvedere courtyard from the Pinecone courtyard. The upper floor was dedicated to the conservation and study. A series of cabinets placed along the walls and around pillars was planned in advance to receive volumes which were probably arranged horizontally. The temperature is held at a steady 20-22 Celsius with relative humidity at 50%. The space available for shelving, even though a certian amount of compact type shelves running on rails have been installed, is no longer adequate. The doubts expressed by the Manuscript department about possible damage to fragile miniatures and ink works, caused by vibrations due to the movement of compact shelving, has resulted in a suspension of the project.
The vatican library is, like other libraries, primarily a collection of individual works; its content emphasize religious subjects and allied fields such as philosophy and art history. When the library and the secret Archives were separated, the library got more than its share of the community property.