Introducing Imagine2035: the Library’s new ten year vision
30 Jun 2026
Explore plans to evolve services, spaces and research support
Imagine2035 is our Library’s new ten‑year vision, developed over a year of engagement with almost 200 colleagues, and shaped by conversations with students, researchers and partners across and beyond the University. It outlines how our library, Britain’s third‑largest academic library system, will help deliver From Manchester, for the world, and contribute to global thinking about the future of research libraries.
The vision commits the Library to six major transformations by 2035:
- Service, to engine of student success
- Collection, to world‑class knowledge infrastructure
- Neutral platform, to truth‑teller
- Local service, to global cultural force
- Reactive, to architect of our future
- Workplace, to community where people thrive
These will be delivered through five strategic themes and twenty‑five anchor initiatives, each mapped directly to the University’s Manchester 2035 Leaps.
Key initiatives
- International launches of the British Pop Archive in New York, London and Berlin (2026–27)
- Major exhibitions of the Library’s manuscript collections in North America (2026 and 2029)
- Developing the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre as the national reference point for anti‑racist scholarship
- Establishing a Humanitarian Archive with HCRI
- A complete reimagining of the Main Library as a flexible learning ecosystem
- Achieving 100% validated Open Access compliance by 2029
- Delivering a sector‑leading AI Accelerator Programme through the world’s first Directorate of AI in a major research library
Professor Christopher Pressler:
“Imagine2035 is not a strategy written for the Library — it is written by it. Almost two hundred colleagues shaped this vision over an academic year, alongside students and partners who told us what the Library must become. Britain’s third‑largest academic library system holds a particular responsibility at this moment: not only to support the University’s ambitions for 2035, but to help create and deliver them. The world has changed more in the past five years than in the previous twenty. Imagine2035 is an answer to that change: ambitious, evidence‑led, and built on the foundation of one of the great libraries of the world.”