The World's Busiest Library

May 30, 2007 2:01 PM

The director of Bogota's Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango believes that, with around 10,000 visitors per day, it's the world's most-used library (in terms of physical users). Is there any evidence out there to suggest that she's right or wrong?
posted by Holly to society & culture (6 comments total)

Yep. The May 16th, 2005 edition of the Engineering News-Record has this info about the central location of the Seattle Public Library:

"The Seattle Public Library has completed 15 of 27 projects in its $235-million Libraries for All capital program. But it is having to do a little touch-up work at the central library because of wear-and-tear from crowds at the wildly popular building.

Work is under way at the central library refinishing wood floors and repainting and adding rubber runners to stairs, which have not worn that well under the feet of 10,000 to 16,000 visitors a day. Work also continues on developing better signage to ease confusion about wayfinding in the unconventional space.

According to the library, the building designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is the "busiest place in town except for the popular Pike Place Market. Planners had anticipated only 8,000 visitors per day."

I also so a random reference that gave the title of world's busiest library to the New York Public Library, but no concrete figure. I'd guess that it is indeed NYPL.
posted by cashman at 2:24 PM on May 30, 2007

Apologies for the formatting. I can find random information, but indenting on mefi still eludes me.
posted by cashman at 2:25 PM on May 30, 2007

You're asking about individual library locations? If so, it doesn't look like New York makes it...

"Mid-Manhattan Library is the system's largest circulating branch, with over 2 million items circulating each year, as many as 6,000 visitors per day."

I did find one other candidate via Google:

"With over 10,000 visitors per day, the BPI [BPI (Bibliothèque publique d'information) of the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris] is one of France's largest public libraries..."
posted by ormondsacker at 3:19 PM on May 30, 2007

SPL seems to have some fuzzy math going on. I don't know. Here they say their 2005 door count for the central branch was roughly 2 million. But if it was 10k+ a day, shouldn't it be 3.5 million at the least? Or am I not doing the numbers right?
posted by cashman at 7:05 PM on May 30, 2007

cashman: Wouldn't that depend on how many days per year they're open? If it's only five days per week, it's in the right ballpark; if it's 6 days per week, then you're right, either the total is low or the 10k/day figure is high.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:21 PM on May 30, 2007

It seems likely that the Seattle figures are from shortly after they opened that branch, say that month or first few months, when everyone had to go have their look.
posted by Margalo Epps at 8:49 PM on May 30, 2007