 Since its inception the library has been housed in numerous places including the crawl space of a university building and a wholesale grocery warehouse.As of 2016 the special collections library is located on the first floor of the Harold B. Lee Library and is considered to hold "the finest collection of rare books in the Intermountain West and the second finest Mormon collection in existence".Recording and preserving history had been an important part of the mission of BYU even before an official archive was established.