This is the first in a series of arti­cles high­light­ing places you might have seen (and some you might have not seen) dur­ing the typ­i­cal student-led col­lege tour, that are all wor­thy of a sec­ond visit.

The Library.

A Shangra-Li for all things writ­ten, recorded, or doc­u­mented, the typ­i­cal prospec­tive stu­dent should not dis­count the qual­ity of a par­tic­u­lar school’s library when decid­ing upon where to spend the next four years. Most tour guides will take their groups through the library’s entrance, guide them through one of the study lounge’s and then lead the group of out the library to ensure that there is time for the remain­ing sights on tour.

What most prospec­tive stu­dents do not real­ize is that they will be spend­ing many week­day, and week­end evenings, and early morn­ing hours in the library work­ing through chem­istry prob­lem sets, writ­ing final papers for the Phi­los­o­phy 101, or sim­ply rehears­ing group pre­sen­ta­tions. So as a prospec­tive stu­dent, it makes sense to head back and explore one of the places you will prob­a­bly spend more time in rel­a­tively to your own room. When eval­u­at­ing libraries (or mul­ti­ple libraries, as there are col­leges who fea­ture more than one library on cam­pus grounds) here are few points to consider:

• Library Hours: Dur­ing my first two years at Oxy, the library was only open until mid­night Sun­day through Thurs­day, and until 10 PM on Fri­day and Sat­ur­day. For the few times that I planned on work­ing through the night to com­plete a paper, it was an incon­ve­nience to pack up my stuff, and find another place besides my dorm to con­tinue the night’s work. For­tu­nately, at the begin­ning of my Junior year, Occi­den­tal Col­lege insti­tuted 24 hour library ser­vice Sun­day through Thurs­day. At many larger uni­ver­si­ties, it is stan­dard for the library to be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

• Study Space: Most libraries offer a wide range of spaces to com­plete your work. From long tables shared with other stu­dious peers, to indi­vid­ual desks located in the quiet, iso­lated, cor­ners where there is no cell phone recep­tion or WIFI, you are bound to find a loca­tion that best resem­bles your cur­rent study­ing set-up.

• Size: Not all libraries are the same—ex: The Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia at Berkeley’s main library (which hap­pens to be one of sev­eral libraries on cam­pus), with its museum-esque read­ing room, and Occi­den­tal College’s one and only Mary Nor­ton Clapp library. It should be intu­itively obvi­ous that larger schools would offer stu­dents mul­ti­ple libraries, or as Berke­ley calls them, Affil­i­ate Libraries, where as smaller schools might pro­vide stu­dents with one, main library, with a few major-based libraries  about the size of a stan­dard class room, hous­ing related jour­nals and magazines.

What makes your college’s library stand out from the rest? As always, feel free to share your two cents below.