We’re very pleased to announce that, following a great deal of constructive discussion between ourselves, the University and the Students Union, the Library will be extending its opening hours from the beginning of the 2015-16 academic year.
From the end of September the following extensions will take place:
- During term time, the Library will remain open until 2am every day, rather than closing at midnight as before.
- Opening times during the 2016 Easter vacation will be extended from 5.30pm so that the Library will remain open until 8pm Monday-Friday.
- Our 2016 New Year 24-7 opening period will now begin on the first Monday of term (4th January) rather than starting midweek as before.
We’ve been working very closely over this issue with the Students Union, especially Amy Ward (VP Education), and we have been guided by student comments and opinions that you’ve made through our surveys and feedback forms. So these improvements are very much the result of Amy’s hard work and your feedback – and we are delighted that we have the resources to implement these enhancements to our service. We hope you find them useful.
And if you have any other comments or feedback you wish to make regarding any aspect of the Library’s services, don’t hesitate to let us know – we’re always happy to receive the views of our users.
It will be great if we could see existing library statistics for current usage patterns and in the future as well with the new opening hours in the same period. I remember seeing a blog post doing something similar earlier on this year.
Also, could the library do something similar showing how many people are using the library at a particular time when viewing the statistics, similar to what Loughborough Sport do with Powerbase? Thanks.
Dear Huzaifa,
We will certainly look into how we communicate tends in usage to give people a better idea about how the changes in opening hours have affected the gate count – having invested in extending our opening hours, we need to ensure the money has been invested wisely. We do publish annual visits in our annual report, which is available online, but could certainly see about publishing data on a more regular basis.
We cannot currently show how many people are in the building as they do in Powerbase as their webpages have been designed by an external company which we do not have the budget for. However, we are looking to update our webpages over the next 12 months, so will certainly see if it is possible at that stage.
Regards,
Matt Cunningham
User Services Manager