During his dense cultural activity Giosue Carducci has collected a large library that documents the best of literary production in the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Early editions (XVII-XVIII Centuries), texts rare hard to find in other libraries and all the authors (Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Chiabrera, Parini, Monti, Leopardi) are present in editions philological and found the best comments. The writer of many books he wrote down the date of the arrival of the new specimen, and how he came: for the purchase, by gift or exchange. Carducci himself surveyed the pieces of his library hours sorting them by author, topic for hours, hours for chronological subdivisions. No less attention is devoted to the organization of its archives which, together with the rich work in verse and prose, has preserved all the evidence to document useful to themselves and to hand down to posterity his many activities. Passionate bibliophile, Carducci has finally met in his house a valuable collection of autographs and codes related to the great nineteenth century European names.

In 1902, Queen Margherita of Savoia, with the intent of the generous financial support and interpreting the poet's desire that the "old comrades of my dreams and of my thoughts" did not go missing after his death, he bought the library-archive (Lit 40,000), in order to make a gift in 1907, along with the house (purchased in 1906) to the Municipality of Bologna, who undertook to keep "perpetually" books and papers of the poet-professor. Prepared catalogs and inventories, by 1921 its assets to the public. The original, in accordance with the aims of the institute, has been enhanced and enriched by materials of interest, and Carducci Carducci.

In keeping with the objective, defined in 1996, documenting the story of eight-twentieth-century Italian literature through libraries and archives associated with the protagonists of cultural life, active in Bologna, between Alma Mater and other institutions, Casa Carducci has acquired and acquiring new collections and repositories.