Sumy State University Library was founded in September 1960 as a branch technical library of Sumy General Technical Faculty of the Ukrainian Correspondence Polytechnic Institute.

The first employee and organizer was a graduate of the Kharkiv State Library Institute, I. Razdorska. 380 copies of educational and methodical literature were transferred to the newly created subdivision for temporary storage. The library was located in a small room on the 3rd floor of the training and consulting center on the street Pryvokzalna (m. Sumy).

In 1966, when the branch of the Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute was established, the funds of the Library numbered more than 30 thousand copies.

In 1989, under the leadership of T. Slabko, the Library was moved to a new, modern four-story building with a total area of 5,000 m2.

In 1992, 2 branches of the Library were established: at the medical faculty and in the student dormitory.

Since 1999, the SumDU Library has been entered in the register of the Higher Attestation Commission for sending out dissertation abstracts.

In 2008, the Museum of Historical and Local Lore Sciences of SumDU was opened on the premises of the Central Library, founded by the candidate of philological sciences V.B. Zvagelsky.

In 2009, the Library of Sumy State University became the "Library of the Year" according to the version of the Ukrainian Library Association for the introduction of new technologies, computerization of library processes and the creation of an open information environment.

In 2011, the site of SumDU Library became the first in the nomination "The best site of the library of a higher educational institution" according to the results of the All-Ukrainian competition of library Internet sites.

In 2013, the Electronic Catalog of the SumDU Library entered the top 10 best catalogs in Ukraine.

In 2014, SumDU Library received a letter of thanks from the All-Ukrainian public organization "Ukrainian Library Association" for the high level of electronic catalogs.

In 2016, the Scientific Library of the Ukrainian Academy of Banking of the NBU became part of the SumDU Library as a result of the merger of two educational institutions. Currently, the branch of the library is located in the Congress Center of SumDU.

In 2018, the Strategy of Development of the SumDU Library for 2018–2022 was approved, which defines the mission, goals, vision, guidelines, and priority areas of reforming the university library center.

In 2018, the SumDU repository according to the Webometrics Transparent Ranking of Repositories ranking 35th among all global repositories, 29th among the world's institutional repositories, and 1st among Ukrainian repositories in terms of the number of documents indexed by Google Scholar.

In 2019, SumDU Library became the winner in the nomination "Large Libraries" of the competition "Library of the Year 2019" of the Ukrainian Library Association, for the implementation of projects "Reading changes us and everything around" and "Green Library".

In 2019, the Library joined the global flash mob TetrisChallenge. BBC Ukraine made a selection of Ukrainian participants #TetrisChallenge, which included a photo taken by the staff of the SumDU library.

In 2019, one of the reading rooms of the library was converted into Coworking "Univer CITY". Zones for learning and communication have been created, modern licensed and open software and cloud services have been installed in order to popularize them and actively implement them in the educational process and science.

In 2019, the library staff won the Hit FM "Work-Dance" promotion.

In 2020, the Library launched the project "SumDU on the pages of Wikipedia". The work of the project is to create and post materials about different areas of activity and personalities of the university to the free encyclopedia Wikipedia, in order to promote the achievements of the university.

In 2020, according to the Webometrics Transparent Ranking of Repositories to the number of works indexed by Google Scholar, SumDU Repository took 1st place among Ukrainian repositories and 47th place among world repositories.

In 2021 on the basis of the SSU Library was created International Club for Students.

According to the results of the August 2021 version of the Transparent Ranking world ranking from Webometrics, SSU Repository is the first among the institutional repositories of Ukraine in terms of the number of documents indexed by Google Scholar (59,500). Our repository ranks 35th out of 3,803 institutional repositories worldwide and 45th out of 3,942 repositories worldwide.