The reading rooms are open to all people who would like to use books and reference works from the holdings of the Main Library.
The original appearance (architect Heinrich von Ferstel, completed in 1884) of the Library’s largest reading room has been largely preserved. It has 350 seats and an open-shelf area comprising about 60,000 volumes. Books are displayed according to subject areas and include lexica, dictionaries, subject bibliographies, textbooks, texts, critical complete editions and handbooks. These books are reference holdings and may not be borrowed. Library users can take them from the shelves and use them at the Library.
You are obliged to leave your coats and jackets at the cloakroom. Please store your bags (including laptop cases), coats and jackets in the lockers. You are not allowed to bring food and drinks into the reading rooms. Please keep your mobile phone in silent mode.
The catalogue room includes library catalogues from the old stock of the University Library as well as different general and subject-specific reference works. This includes primarily bibliographies, biographical reference works and encyclopaedias.
The first reading room is equipped with 18 PCs of the Vienna University Computer Center (ZID). After logging in via their u:account, members of the University of Vienna can use these PCs to access different programmes. Moreover, the room features a coin-operated copier, a u:print printing device (u:card required) and a book scanner (flash drive required).
In this reading room, you can use books that were published more than 100 years ago (with the exception of books from the location Teinfaltstrasse), books with the note “A-Magazin”, rare books with the shelf mark addition “E.S.” or “ES-Magazin”, as well as large books (III, IV, V, VI).
You can request books that are subject to usage restrictions via u:search. The “Special Request” tab allows you to order books that have not yet been catalogued in u:search. We will notify you as soon as the books are ready to use at the reading room for old books.
You are obliged to leave your coats and jackets at the cloakroom. You have to store all your bags (including laptop cases), coats and jackets in the lockers. You are not allowed to bring food and drinks into the reading room for old books. Please keep your mobile phone in silent mode.
All students and employees of the University of Vienna who have a valid u:account can access the University’s Wi-Fi network in all reading rooms. To establish a Wi-Fi connection, make sure that your laptop is configured via DHCP, that you are using your Wi-Fi password (not your u:account password) and that you select the eduroam network.
