The Library of the Civic Historical Collections was established together with the Archive to complete the historical collections and found its first home in the Sale della Rocchetta at the Sforzesco Castle. Over time, bibliographic material and texts relating to the post-unification period, the First World War, the post-war period, fascism, the Second World War, the resistance and the contemporary age were added to the initial nucleus, made up of publications of a Risorgimento nature. Over 130.000 volumes, brochures and periodicals are available for consultation.

The Library has been cataloging with the SBN system since 1991: from this date all the volumes purchased (around 1000 per year) are visible via theOpac of the Lombardy Region.

You can also consult the book collection here link on alphabetica the ICCD advanced bibliographic portal, which retrieves news and materials within a digital ecosystem that connects different databases. The portal returns to the user materials present in the ICCU's historical databases: OPAC SBN, Manus Online, EDIT16, SBN Teca, Digitalised Historical Catalogues. 

We also proceed to catalog the previous material backwards.
Other particular fonds acquired by the Library in recent years, which may contain material published both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are included in the Opac of the SBN (Federico Curato Fund, Carlo Giglio Fund, Raffaele Cormio Fund and Angelo Oliviero Olivetti Fund).
The constituent nucleus of the Library, the Bertarelli Fund, is being cataloged in SBN: the precious volumes and periodicals contained in the fund (dating from the end of the eighteenth century to 1900) are also listed in a paper catalog (3 volumes) which can be consulted in the Library.