page_title: Ball State University
section_title: Library system
hierarchical_section_title: Ball State University / Academics / Library system
caption_attribution_description: English: Bracken Library, viewed looking south from Central Green. The Frog Baby Fountain is in the foreground.
context_page_description: Ball State University is a public research university in Muncie, Indiana. It has two satellite facilities in Fishers and Indianapolis. On July 25, 1917, the Ball brothers, industrialists and founders of the Ball Corporation, acquired the foreclosed Indiana Normal Institute for $35,100 and gave the school and surrounding land to the State of Indiana. The Indiana General Assembly accepted the donation in the spring of 1918, with an initial 235 students enrolling at the Indiana State Normal School – Eastern Division on June 17, 1918.
  Ball State is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity". The university is composed of eight academic colleges. As of 2017, total enrollment was 22,513 students, including 17,004 undergraduates and 5,509 postgraduates. The university offers about 190 undergraduate majors and 130 minor areas of study and more than 140 master's, doctoral, certificate, and specialist degrees.
  There are more than 400 student organizations and clubs on campus, including 34 fraternities and sororities. Ball State athletic teams compete in Division I of the NCAA and are known as the Ball State Cardinals.
context_section_description: Bracken Library is the university's main library. Completed in 1975, Bracken houses five floors of classrooms, computer labs, private study suites, and video viewing suites. The library provides access to about 2.3 million books, periodicals, microforms, audiovisual materials, software, government publication maps, musical scores, archival records, and other information sources. Bracken Library hosts the Ball State University Digital Media Repository, an open-access resource containing over 130,000 digital objects in 64 collections, as well as the Center for Middletown Studies. System branches include the Architecture Library and the Science–Health Science Library. Over 1.1 million visits were made throughout the University Libraries system between 2011 and 2012.
caption: Bracken Library, the central campus library, was completed in 1975.
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