Designed in the Italian Renaissance style and built of the same blue limestone as the other college buildings around the courtyard, the exterior walls of Van Millingen Hall were supported by steel frames instead of concrete. The building, constructed with two floors at the front at the level of the buildings around the campus square and a total of 5 floors including the 3 floors below the entrance, cost $75,000, half of which was donated by Mrs. John S. Kennedy, the wife of the last Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

Alexander Van Millingen (1840-1915), after whom the library building was named and who was renowned for his books on the Byzantine monuments of Istanbul, served as a professor of history at Robert College (1878-1915). When Professor Van Millingen died, he bequeathed all his books and 1,000 British Pounds to the library. Van Millingen's books formed the foundation of the Near East Collection. Initially built solely as a library building, the Van Millingen Hall Building was also used as the office of the director of Robert College and for faculty meetings, and it served as the main reading room of the library until the early 1960s. The number of books, which was a few thousand when Kaspar Tüygil took office and which he increased to 40,000 by 1952, exceeded 100,000 when Boğaziçi University was founded in 1971. As a result of the existing building becoming insufficient, the library moved to its new building on the North Campus in 1983. The Van Millingen Hall building, which served as a library for many years, today serves as the building for the Rectorate and administrative offices, and the periodicals consisting of some old issues placed on the shelves of the Rectorate Meeting Hall on its top floor keep the memory of its former function alive.

The library, which maintains its currency by rapidly acquiring the newest books on its subjects into its collection with the contributions of faculty members, strives to best preserve the past with its valuable printed works dating from the 16th to the 20th century, numbering close to 30,000, in its Rare Works Collection. The Near East Department, which holds more than 130,000 books written about Turkey and neighbouring countries, has been carefully built up over many years. There is no similar collection in our country to this very special collection, which houses works written on the history, culture, language and literature of the Ottoman world and its peoples. In addition, the US History Documents Collection, consisting of 2,500 volumes of books, is another collection without parallel in Turkey. For more information about the Rare Works Collection, you can visit the Boğaziçi University Archives and Rare Works Unit website.