This work deals with the university library and its relationship with the university, reflecting and questioning its role as an organism of cultural formation. In order to observe this library/university relationship, a methodological option was made for qualitative, descriptive research, based on bibliographic and documentary research, based on an integrative literature review, and Discourse Analysis was used as a tool to analyze the documents governing selected universities and their respective library systems. The university library is a reflection of the institution to which it belongs, integrating policies and cultures of the academic universe. Recognizing and understanding the context of this library is a basic issue for possible transformations.Aiming to make it an essential device in Higher Education, not merely an accessory instance, the research intends to systematize references that are at the base of the concept of the Brazilian university library, in order to identify and understand the formally established place it occupies in the academic order; to raise conceptual and methodological parameters that guide their performance; to identify categories constituting the parameters of their orientation; reflect on its role as a cultural formation organization. The study considered concepts of university model, university library, cultural device and cultural formation. The process of analyzing the guidelines of three selected universities and their respective university libraries, namely:

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