Cambridge collected £98,000 in library fines last year

Cambridge’s total is the third highest out of all UK universities

The University Library, alongside its 21 affiliate libraries, collected £98,000 worth of finesEmma Rutter

by Devarshi Lodhia

This article is 8 years old

Friday February 23 2018, 12:00am

Cambridge students received £98,478 in library fines across all University libraries for the academic year 2016/17, new data has revealed.

The sum places Cambridge third nationally, behind Oxford and King’s College, London, both of which handed out fines of more than £100,000 each. Oxford’s fines totalled £167,689.

The findings, which come courtesy of freedom of information requests submitted by the i newspaper, show that universities across the country received more than £3.5 million from library fines.

Alongside the central University Library, the University manages a further twenty-one affiliate libraries associated with the UL, including faculty libraries such as the Squire Law Library and the Seeley Historical Library.

The Sidgwick library dropbox has a Twitter account and it’s surprisingly sassy

Fine policies differ across each library, with fines varying between 25p and £1 for each working day for overdue books. Notably, the Seeley charges 25p per hour for overdue special subject material, such as primary sources, which can only be borrowed from 2:30pm until 10.30am the next day.

According to the Seeley Historical Library website: “Fines still outstanding at graduation will be treated as debts to the University and affect the award of a degree.” This means that students may even be unable to graduate until they pay off their library fines

Support Varsity

Varsity is the independent newspaper for the University of Cambridge, established in its current form in 1947. In order to maintain our editorial independence, our print newspaper and news website receives no funding from the University of Cambridge or its constituent Colleges.

We are therefore almost entirely reliant on advertising for funding and we expect to have a tough few months and years ahead.

In spite of this situation, we are going to look at inventive ways to look at serving our readership with digital content and of course in print too!

Therefore we are asking our readers, if they wish, to make a donation from as little as £1, to help with our running costs. Many thanks, we hope you can help!