Founded 87 years ago, the Central Library was the first in Korea to launch an electronic management system in the early 1990s. The Library continued to evolve its information system and in April 2001 introduced the YDL (Yonsei Integrated Digital Library), a digital library system. YDL is composed of "YOURS PLUS", a new information retrieval system based on the library automation system, and "PLATON" (Pioneer Library for Academic Activities On Network), a lecture and research support information system.

The Central Library possesses about 1.5 million volumes, including important Korean classics, government documents and archives, and selected foreign archives and materials. The Library also houses around 12,000 journals. In recent years, the Main Library has increased its collection of digitized special collections such as scholarly Web documents and image databases.

Currently, the library has over 100,000 image files in addition to an extensive CD-ROM collection, electronic journals and online databases enabling faculty, students, and staff to connect to information centers in Korea and throughout the world.

Users can choose from 4 different kinds of searches when using the GSIS Library website (http://gsislibrary.yonsei.ac.kr/).

Word Search: This is useful if you don’t exactly know the author’s name or title of the material you are looking for or if you are performing a general search for material on a particular topic. Simply enter relevant keywords in the search field. These keywords may be an author’s name, a part of a title, or a subject.