Six educational libraries and reading rooms of the university annually serve more than 10 thousand readers, issue more than 200 thousand volumes of books, magazines, newspapers. The treasury of the fundamental library is the department of book monuments, where more than 20 thousand unique rarities are stored. The oldest books in the collection are: Thucydides’ History, published in Basel in 1540, Petrarch’s Sonnets and Canzones, published in Venice in 1553, Triodion, published by Andronicus Nevezha, a student of Ivan Fedorov, in Moscow in 1589, and the Code of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, 1649.
The department’s collection contains many first editions of popular textbooks, lifetime editions of the works of outstanding scientists and teachers, including Leonty Magnitsky’s Arithmetic, published by order of Peter I in 1703, M. V. Lomonosov’s Russian Grammar, published during his lifetime, and The Primer, or Elementary Teaching for Those Who Want to Learn, printed in Chernigov in 1765, with the autograph of its author, Archimandrite Ioil, who was once the abbot of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery in Yaroslavl. Also worthy of mention are lifetime editions of Russian and foreign classics, including A.S. Pushkin, I.A. Krylov, I.S. Turgenev, L.N. Tolstoy, N.A. Nekrasov, and others. The first edition of N.V. Gogol’s poem «Dead Souls», the sketch for which was made by the author himself. The collection contains books with autographs of D.V. Davydov, V.G. Korolenko, D.I. Ilovaisky, N.I. Kostomarov, M. Gorky, and other famous writers, scientists, and public figures.
If the heart of the university is its main building, then the soul is here, and therefore, despite the main purpose — scientific and practical assistance in the professional training of a biology teacher, the garden has repeatedly become an inspiration and venue for cultural and educational events, shows, festivals with the widest address: the regional stage of the international competition for the study and protection of trees in the city «Take a tree into your family», the ice sculpture festival «Tales of the winter garden», the orchid exhibition «Secrets of the garden», the planting of an orchard and the installation of a memorial sign «To my teachers», the «Memory Garden» of the hockey team «Lokomotiv».
The structure of the Botanical Garden includes: an arboretum (in the eastern part of the garden), a systematic section, a school educational and experimental section (in the central part), an orchard «TO MY TEACHERS», a section of grafted forms — «Memory Garden», a Japanese garden, a greenhouse complex, areas for acclimatization of plants and a mixed forest.
Using the various sections of the garden and the plant collections collected in them, the staff conducts large-scale research, educational and methodological, educational work, field practices in the methods of teaching biology, the basics of agriculture and plant physiology, anatomy, morphology, and plant taxonomy. The botanical garden has a collection of «red book» plants, numbering about 35 species (the «Green Red Book» exposition). One of the most important tasks of the Botanical Garden is environmental propaganda and assistance in the popularization of botanical knowledge.