The library of Xiangya Medical College was founded in 1914, it has a history of nearly ninety years now, it's one of the earliest library for medical school in China. The library is the bio-medical information center of Central South University. It's also the central library of central southern China in the Medical Literature Resources Sharing Network of the Ministry of Public Health, and the appointed retrieval unit for medical projects of the Ministry of Public Health. The library now has a floor space of 8,000 square meters and 800 reading seats. It's now on a way to a modernized medical library.

The library and the Department of Information Management are combined together. It now has 6 prof., 9 associate prof. and quite a few lecturers or librarians. The qualities of the librarians are relatively high. The library consists of circulation department, periodicals department, information development department, acquisition and cataloging department, reference department, information analysis and research department, information technology department and administrative office.

The open section includes: literature retrieval room, Chinese and foreign books loan desk, teacher's reading room, student's reading room, Chinese periodicals reading room, foreign periodicals reading room, social science periodicals reading room, electronic reading room, audio-visual reading room. The library has an abundant of collection; it has 600,000 volumes of books, 3167 kinds of journals including 1648 bio-medical journals. The collection is focused on medical genetics, pathophysiology, pharmacology, general surgery, psychiatry and mental health, internal medicine(endocrinal and metabolic disease), clinical combination of TCM and western medicine(internal medicine), neurology and so on. The bio-medical literature searching aids are complete, the library now has more than 100 kinds of Chinese and foreign searching periodicals and more than one thousand kinds of reference books such as dictionaries, lexicons, encyclopedias, yearbooks, guides etc; it also has over 20 kinds of bio-medical CD-ROM database. Besides, the library has established interlibrary loan co-operation with other medical library, so we can acquire literatures from any of these libraries in China. The library has been connected to the Internet, we can obtain resources on the Internet freely now; we can also obtain photocopies of original documents via organizations such as "Bridge of Asia" and external libraries. The library now has more than one hundred of workstations, servers and PCs, and other advanced equipments. The library has comparatively high academic status among medical libraries in China, it's now the vice director library of the Library Association of Chinese Medical and Pharmaceutical Universities and Colleges, the vice director library of the Committee of Library and Information works of Universities and Colleges of Hunan Province, the vice director library of the Library Association of Hunan Province, member of the standing committee of the National Academic Research Society for Periodicals, and member of the standing committee of the National Research Society for the Teaching of Medical Literature Search. The Department of Information Management is the only one that can confer master's degree in sci-tech informatics among the medical information education units in China.