The new Sackler Library is fitted inside a small urban block on the west side of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The library is a complex of buildings centered around a relocated Ashmolean Library combined with History of Art, Historical and Humanities Libraries from around the university. Other buildings include the Griffiths Institute of Egyptology and the Near East, a new gallery of twentieth century art and extensions to the Institute of Archaeology.

The library is contained in a large circular building which is surrounded with lower wings all arranged round small courtyards. The entrance to the complex is through a small circular classical pavilion designed in the Doric order of the Temple of Apollo as Bassae first excavated by C.R. Cockerell, the architect of the Ashmolean Museum.