Ranked: The universities who use the library the most

You’re probably reading this in the silent study


It’s that time of year when the library becomes the social hub of university life. Everyone is there. The chances of you getting a seat after 10am are almost as slim as you getting a job after university.

But a study by The Tab reveals just how hard each university works, according to how many times you visit the library in an academic year. We calculated the average student visits the library 56 times a year.

Royal Hollaway took top spot, closely followed by Warwick in second place which doesn’t help their reputation as the most boring unis in the land. They both averaged 90 and 88 library visits per year, respectively, over 30 times more than the average student.

Queen’s Belfast propped up the table with an average of 24 times, an impressively low number for a member of the Russell Group. They were preceded by UCLan, Brookes, Hull and Northumbria which isn’t particularly surprising as they aren’t exactly renowned for their intellectual rigour.

Oxford and Cambridge’s abundance of college and faculty libraries means they don’t store this info, but they’re likely to be miles in front as they actually have work to do.

Bristol and York also failed to store this info.

We used Freedom of Information requests to establish how many times the library at each university was accessed during the academic year 14/15. The Nerd Index was then formed using our complex and highly accurate formula of dividing the access numbers by the number of students.

Find out where your university features below:

[infogram id=”b910227a-b107-48e2-a2b9-fd1c555ef5cc”]