zlib is "a massively spiffy yet delicately unobtrusive compression library" (source). In short, it provides easy, verbose, and cooperative compression libraries for C and C++.
The below can be used to view all of the installations of zlib on a particular system, where this example uses Coeus.
$ module load zlib-ng
To best use zlib's libraries in a C or C++ program, refer to zlib's example usage.