The Universiteit Maastricht, founded in 1976, is the youngest university in the Netherlands and growing rapidly. At the time of writing there are 12,000 students and 3, 000 staff. The UM has seven faculties and one University College.

The Universiteit Maastricht (UM) is known at home and abroad for its unique education system: Problem-based learning. This type of education is a high-scorer with educational inspectorates and comparative research. A further aspect of the university’s profile is its strong international orientation. This profile appeals to students: students from all over the Netherlands and an increasing number of foreign students choose the Maastricht system.

Although relatively young, the University Library (UL) has a large collection of old books, some from the 15th century, the so-called Jesuit collection. In 1971 the Dutch Government decided to purchase the libraries of former Jesuit colleges and of a Great Seminary as a basis for the library of the university- to-be. Thus the foundations of the university library were laid.

The UL has no separate faculty or institute libraries; there is one University Library devided over two locations: The facilities for Health Sciences, Life Sciences, Medicine, Psychology and the Academic Hospital are concentrated in the Randwijck Library. The facilities for the faculties of Arts & Culture, Economics & Business Administration, General Sciences, Law, University College Maastricht and Center for European Studies are located in the Inner City Library. All library users can access both locations.

Special feature of the UL are the so-called 'Studielandschappen': the Learning Resource Centres. A 'Studielandschap' is a unique facility to support problem-based learning, as applied at UM. The Learning and Resource Centres consist of several reading rooms, suitable for individual of group study (small and large rooms, with or without computers, study cells and audio-visual units), and offer an extensive collection educational tools which are used in the faculty curriculum (books, video tapes, computers with access to databases, programmes and faculty databases; in Randwijck also anatomical models).