The Plan

There are many libraries in Cambridge. It is, therefore, slightly disappointing that in the two years and nearly one term of my degree so far I have only ever been to four.

My degree will eventually cost me £27, 000 in tuition fees alone. As a history student, it's not always easy to see where that's going. There isn't any lab time, we rarely have field trips, and there aren't that many lectures. I do have one hour of one-to-one tuition a week (which is great, but probably doesn't quite add up to £9000 a year) and few classes, all of which are just spent talking. Then I remembered about the libraries. The books that we have access to are probably worth *a very large number* (historian, not a mathmo) times as much as I'll ever pay back out of my student loan.

According to the UL Libraries Directory, there are 140 in Cambridge, which means that even if I visited one every day for the remaining terms of my degree (excluding Sundays because most of them are closed) it's still not possible to get round all of them.

Luckily, some of them are college libraries that I don't have access to, and others are obscure collections that don't normally allow undergrads in, so that narrows them down to a slightly more manageable number.

The challenge is to see how many libraries I can visit in the increasingly short amount of time I have available and to discover the best/nicest/friendliest libraries in Cambridge.

It would be all to easy to simply walk in and out of a load of libraries in one day and claim that I've achieved my goal so here are some criteria for what constitutes a successful library visit:

1. Only one library a day. Probably going to be looking at about two or three a week given training.
2. Try to spend at least three hours there.
3. Work.

Whilst there is a cynical making-the-most-of-my-money aspect to this, it's also about taking advantage of the opportunities available, ensuring that I get enough work done this year, and just spending time in libraries. My time in the Cambridge bubble is limited, and soon I'm going to have to enter the real world, where, apparently, spending all day in a warm room with books doesn't normally constitute work.

So hop aboard for a not particularly thrilling account of all the varieties of library that one small town in the Fens has to offer...