Royal Holloway Library and Study Spaces

Royal Holloway has more places to work than most people discover, and the ones students default to are not always the right ones. This covers the main library and its hours, where to go when it has closed, where the PC labs are, and how printing actually works, since that is the thing everyone needs at short notice and nobody reads about in advance.

At a glance

• Main library: the Emily Wilding Davison Building, around 600,000 volumes and roughly 1,150 study seats.
• Term-time hours: normally 8am to midnight in the Autumn term, going to 24 hours during peak assessment in the Spring and most of the Summer term.
• Always open: the Founder's reading room runs 24 hours a day, year round.
• PC labs: floors 1 to 3 of the Davison Building and the ground floor of the Computer Centre, with many labs open 24 hours.
• Printing: £10 credit per term, charged per side, released at the printer with your student card.

The Emily Wilding Davison Building

The Davison Building is the library and the centre of gravity for studying on campus. It holds the main collection of around 600,000 volumes and roughly 1,150 study seats, along with student services, and it is the building most of your room codes beginning "EWD" point at.

It is not one kind of space. Seating ranges from silent individual desks through to group tables and bookable rooms, and the floors get quieter as you go up, which is the single most useful thing to know about it. If you have arrived at a heaving ground floor and concluded the library is full, go up two floors before you give up. The library café sits inside the building, so a break does not have to mean losing your seat.

Library opening hours

Hours move with the academic year rather than staying fixed:

• Autumn term: normally 8am to midnight, seven days a week.
• Peak assessment: the building runs 24 hours a day during the peak assessment period in the Spring term and through most of the Summer term, with security on site overnight.
• Christmas and Easter closures: reduced hours, and closed entirely on some days.

The pattern is worth planning around. The Davison Building being open all night is a Spring and Summer thing, not an Autumn one, so a December deadline does not come with the same all-night option a May one does. Exact hours are published by the library and do shift year to year, so check their opening-hours page before relying on a late finish.

Where to work when the library is shut

The answer most people do not know in their first year: the Founder's reading room is open 24 hours a day, all year. It is a Victorian room inside the Founder's Building, and it exists precisely so that there is somewhere to work when the Davison Building has closed for the night. It is quiet, it is atmospheric, and in the Autumn term it is the main option after midnight.

Beyond that, many of the PC labs around campus are open 24 hours, which makes them the practical overnight option if you need a machine rather than just a desk. Individual departments also run their own study rooms and labs, and those are often far emptier than the library during busy periods - worth asking your department about in week one rather than in week ten.

PC labs and finding a free machine

The main student labs are on floors 1 to 3 of the Emily Wilding Davison Building, with more on the ground floor of the Computer Centre. Log in with the same college username and password that gets you onto eduroam and into Moodle.

Two practical notes. The Davison and Computer Centre machines are the ones to head for if you also need to print, since those are the locations the university steers printing towards. And the university runs a find-a-PC service showing where free machines are, which is considerably faster than walking three floors during an assessment week.

Printing, scanning and print credit

Printing is the thing everybody needs urgently and nobody sets up in advance. There are three ways to send a job:

• Mobility Print - printing from your own laptop or phone. This is the route the university recommends for personal devices.
• WebPrint - uploading a file through a browser, useful when you cannot install anything.
• From a shared lab PC - print as normal and choose the RHUL-print queue.

Whichever route you use, the job waits in the queue and you release it at a printer using your student ID card, which is why the card matters more than it looks like it should. Sort Mobility Print out on a quiet afternoon in week one; the alternative is configuring it for the first time twenty minutes before a submission deadline.

On cost: every student gets £10 of printer credit automatically each academic term, and charging is per side of paper, so printing double-sided makes that allowance go twice as far. If you run out, top up through the print web portal by choosing Add Credit, with a £5 minimum. The recommended printing locations are the Davison Building and the ground floor of the Computer Centre.

Finding these buildings

The Davison Building, the Founder's reading room and the Computer Centre are at different ends of a 135-acre campus, which matters at one in the morning when you have picked wrong. The campus map in RHUL Mobile pins all of them and routes you there on the real footpaths, and it works offline, which is the difference between a five-minute walk and a fifteen-minute one in the dark.

If you are decoding a room code rather than looking for a building, the timetable guide covers what the prefixes mean. The wider first-week admin - enrolment, your student card, eduroam - is in the first week guide, and the card is what releases your printing, so it connects.

Check before you rely on it

This is an independent guide, not an official Royal Holloway page. Library hours in particular change between terms and between years, and the closure periods move. Before a late-night session or a deadline that depends on a printer being available, confirm against the library's own opening-hours page and the university IT pages.