[Study-Space Series] The Libraries of National Taiwan University

Introduction

I wanted to give students some motivation to prepare for major examinations, so I began introducing university libraries through this study-and-work-space series.

Friends who work in libraries have messaged me to ask why I do not simply let students go themselves. After all, it is a school they may want to attend in the future, and visiting it would be worthwhile.

Well, I think students are not always that diligent. Some may even feel that, if they have to make a special trip, they would rather read a few more pages instead, so I made the special trip myself.

With the pandemic, university libraries were almost entirely closed to visitors from other schools, so students might not have been able to visit anyway, haha. That left me to do the visiting and recording.

This series basically covers only National Taiwan University and National Chengchi University, because those are the two schools I have encountered most in my life so far.

Still, as someone who moved from the third academic track to the second and then to the first, it makes sense that I have spent time in so many different libraries, haha.

Compared with National Chengchi University, I have more feelings for National Taiwan University. When I entered National Chengchi University, I was simply focused on finishing my thesis topic.

I was too lazy even to make friends; when choosing courses, I almost never took them with other people because I was looking for thesis inspiration.

At National Taiwan University, though, years passed amid coursework, part-time jobs, and friends.

And in the blink of an eye, this series is nearing its end. It is rather surprising that I have formed the good habit of updating the website every week.

Because I had already introduced the medical library earlier, this visit covers only the main campus. I wanted to make that clear first.

Also, because of the pandemic, library staff I knew said that National Taiwan University’s libraries were not open to outside visitors at that time.

Friends who are interested in going can call to ask when they will begin admitting outside visitors again.

How Do You Get to National Taiwan University?

Driving or riding to National Taiwan University is quite convenient because there are many parking lots, and most of them are not full.

In general, I take the metropolitan railway to the main campus.

Long ago, before the Wenhu Line opened, traveling from Neihu to National Taiwan University felt extremely far away.

You had to take any vehicle that went toward the city center, get off at Yuanshan Station, and then transfer to the metropolitan railway; the trip would take more than an hour.

Now the Red Line no longer goes through Gongguan Station, and the Wenhu Line has opened, so getting to National Taiwan University has become very convenient.

You can simply take the metropolitan railway to Technology Building Station or Gongguan Station. Because I set off from Gangqian Station, I naturally chose Technology Building Station, which I could reach directly.

After getting off at Technology Building Station, though, you still have quite a long walk. I deliberately go to the university around mealtime, have a proper meal in the rear-gate area on Lane 118, and then head to the place I want to visit.

That makes the walk feel less far.

You can decide whether to get off at Gongguan Station or Technology Building Station according to whether your destination is closer to the rear gate or the front gate. I prefer the feeling of a direct trip, though, so even when I am going to the front gate, I get off at Technology Building Station.

I was still in the habit of going to National Taiwan University the previous month because the place where I took drawing classes, Fuxing Design Academy, was near the front gate.

So, after leaving Technology Building Station, I usually switch to a YouBike. It is convenient whether I am going to the rear gate or the front gate.

The Law Library in Wan-Tsai Hall

At different ages, I tended to spend time in different libraries at National Taiwan University. The law library was where I often went during the years when I was studying at the Graduate Institute of Law.

Sometimes, when I needed sources for a thesis but did not especially want to go all the way to National Chengchi University, I would spend time at the law library.

National Taiwan University’s College of Law has two buildings: Wan-Tsai Hall and Lin-Tse Hall. I personally went to Wan-Tsai Hall much more often.

Although, to be honest, perhaps I simply did not know whether Lin-Tse Hall had a library, haha.

I forget which event it was, but during university I often practiced activities in the first-floor plaza of Lin-Tse Hall because its enormous glass wall was useful for checking movements.

To reach Wan-Tsai Hall, you first pass through the first-floor plaza of Lin-Tse Hall, then cross a tiny pond and an area that feels like a small forest. Wan-Tsai Hall then comes into view.

Seeing Wan-Tsai Hall does not necessarily mean you have found the College of Law Library. The quickest route is probably through the small side entrance, where you can spot it right away.

The College of Law Library’s service desk is at the entrance. When you walk in, the first thing you see is a shelf of new books, and its design is very distinctive.

The College of Law Library is not particularly large, but it is not small either. The books and journals you need can be found here, which makes it excellent in its own way.

Because it is the College of Law Library, nearly all the books inside are law-related, which was very friendly to me when I was writing my thesis.

When I was writing my thesis, I needed journal articles as references. Some were unavailable at National Chengchi University but held by the National Taiwan University Library, so being able to come to Wan-Tsai Hall was a huge help.

The seats for studying and working are generally very comfortable. The chairs are the kind that roll easily, each person has a fairly wide space, and there is room for many books.

The floor is carpeted, so you can hardly hear people walking or chairs rolling. You can roll around without worry, perhaps.

If you become tired from studying, you can lie down on a sofa for a short rest. The law library sofas feel as though you sink into them and are wonderfully enveloping—not sure what kind of review that is. I strongly recommend that friends who enjoy sleeping on sofas try them.

Most law-library self-study seats are along the walls; there are few dedicated self-study areas. During examination periods, seats can be scarce.

Most older journals can be found on the bookcases around here, and the College of Law’s master’s and doctoral theses are also mostly here. If you are writing a law thesis and do not want to go to the National Central Library, the National Taiwan University law library is a very good choice.

The first and second floors of the law library feel similar, but the second floor has a few more small private rooms and its self-study seats are more spread out.

Of course, because this is the College of Law Library, the people studying here tend to be undergraduates preparing for midterms or finals, national-examination candidates, and people writing theses.

When you walk around, you see study handouts from Gao Dian, Bao Cheng, Du Xiang, and Du Jia on almost every table. Some people are watching correspondence courses, so you can fully feel the atmosphere of preparing for national examinations, haha.

Overall, because most people are preparing for examinations, the atmosphere is a little severe rather than relaxed. The College of Law Library is actually quite quiet and very suitable for people who are sensitive to noise.

Koo Chen-fu Memorial Library, College of Social Sciences

Because I photographed these places on the same day, I went straight from Wan-Tsai Hall to the College of Social Sciences Library.

Before walking from Wan-Tsai Hall to the College of Social Sciences Library, you pass some pebble paths that look carefully designed and many plants.

The weather was exceptionally good that day, so the College of Social Sciences Library looked beautiful from every angle. Yet, being naturally a homebody, I only wanted to find air conditioning as quickly as possible.

The entrance is actually on Xinhai Road, so you need to make a slight detour.

When you first enter the College of Social Sciences Library, its interior feels very different from what it looks like outside, and for a moment I thought I had gone to the wrong place, haha.

That library event seemed to be happening at every library around that time, because I saw it again later at the main library.

But after passing through a small space, this is the scene you see.

The bookcases on the first floor are placed quite far apart and curve around the space. Walking among them feels a little fantastical.

Perhaps because of the area where I was, most books on the shelves were in foreign languages, and I saw comparatively few Chinese-language books.

There were a lot of people, so I could not openly photograph the seats and had to take the picture through the shelves.

Because the first-floor bookcases are so spread out, there are relatively few first-floor self-study seats. Most are along the floor-to-ceiling glass, like those in the photo above.

The floor-to-ceiling glass receives direct sunlight at noon and in the afternoon, but the College of Social Sciences Library has curtains that can be drawn, so the temperature does not become too hot.

The library’s air-conditioning temperature was also just right.

If you do not like window seats, small round tables sit between the bookcases. Most of the seating is scattered like this.

I went in the afternoon and there were already quite a lot of people, so it felt as though you might need to compete a little for a seat.

Most of the main self-study seating is on the second floor of the College of Social Sciences Library.

You can clearly see that the second floor feels unlike the first. The second floor looks more like an ordinary library.

Compared with the main library, there is genuinely more space between the bookcases at the College of Social Sciences Library. You do not feel crowded when taking a book down, and the space is fairly roomy.

Unlike the College of Law Library, the College of Social Sciences Library has a dedicated self-study area on the second floor. Most people do not linger on the first floor but instead go upstairs to study.

It is the kind of self-study area where people are seriously studying. You mostly hear only walking and pages turning, and it is very quiet.

The second floor also has discussion rooms like these that can be borrowed. I was only passing through that day, so I did not look into the borrowing conditions.

Overall, I personally loved the feeling of the College of Social Sciences Library’s first floor. The floors above it felt more ordinary.

By the way, one area of the second floor is a lounge full of sofas and comfortable beanbags, but every seat was occupied by someone lying down when I went, so I could not take photographs.

Friends who are interested will have to go and try those comfortable seats themselves, haha.

Astronomy and Mathematics Library

After the Astronomy and Mathematics Building was completed, I rarely went to the main library during the rest of my university years. I was almost always at the Astronomy and Mathematics Library instead.

Ah, if I was very sleepy between classes, I would still go lie down on a sofa at the main library.

To reach the Astronomy and Mathematics Building from the rear gate, you generally pass the Computer Center and the Visual Arts Building, as well as the Si-Liang Hall where chemistry experiments are conducted.

Go around the small path behind Si-Liang Hall, and a towering departmental building comes into view. That is the Astronomy and Mathematics Building.

Can people who are not in the Department of Mathematics enter the Astronomy and Mathematics Building? Yes!

As long as you walk in with enough confidence—just kidding.

From my third university year until I graduated from the Graduate Institute of Environmental Health, I completed much of my thesis work in the Astronomy and Mathematics Library.

It was not really because the library had reference books or anything like that. It was simply less well known, so there was no great need to compete for seats, and at the time I often waited for people there.

After entering the Astronomy and Mathematics Building, the first floor has a high ceiling. Looking up, you can see the Astronomy and Mathematics Library itself.

There is no need to take the elevator; you can simply walk up the spiral stairs.

There are lockers outside the entrance of the mathematics library. Long ago, to prevent library books from being lost, people were required to leave their bags outside, and I was always afraid that my belongings would disappear.

So I had to move my laptop, reference books, and valuables back and forth outside as if I were moving house before settling in. Now you can bring your bag directly inside.

Speaking of rules that require bags to be left outside, the first floor of the National Central Library used to have the same rule, but bags can now be brought directly inside there as well.

The Astronomy and Mathematics Library is a space with a two-story-high interior, so being there gives you a very open and refreshed feeling.

There are also shared computers in the middle, which are quite convenient when you need to look something up without having brought a laptop.

Ah, as an aside, the Astronomy and Mathematics Library did not require showing a student identification card to enter. As many years ago, you could enter by signing in, so people from outside the university could come in.

I came back several times after graduating and signed in using the student number from my time at the Graduate Institute of Environmental Health, haha. Anyone who saw it might have thought, ‘Wow, how long have you been studying without graduating?’

There are not many seats with power outlets here, so I personally preferred the second-floor seats with a beautiful view and an outlet.

That is, the seat in the left-hand corner of the photograph above. In addition to having a power outlet, the view outside is excellent.

If I could not make progress on my thesis, a quick glance outside would bring inspiration back. It worked every time, and I highly recommend it to friends whose theses are stuck.

I remember that long ago, a general-physics teacher especially liked to set the general-physics final examination on one of the high floors of the condensed-matter physics building. The teacher would joke, ‘If you cannot write the answer, jumping down would be just right,’ or something like that.

The atmosphere here is wonderful and especially quiet. If you want to take a small nap, you could almost sleep for an entire afternoon—just kidding.

For a while when I was writing a law thesis, I often felt, ‘How did I get myself into this situation?’ At those times, I would come to the Astronomy and Mathematics Building to feel the atmosphere of science and recover a little of my original intention.

I have to admit that I have never picked up and read a single book in the Astronomy and Mathematics Library.

The Main Library

The library where I first started settling in turns out to be the one I am introducing last.

By the end, the main library was not really a place for studying for me at all; I mostly used it for sleeping, quietly, as in the photograph below.

My collaborator, who is also a friend who graduated from National Taiwan University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, once said, ‘I cannot imagine why anyone could sleep directly on the sofas in the main library. I really could not do it.’

Then I suddenly could not remember what the main library’s full name was.

If you enter from the front gate, just walk straight down Royal Palm Boulevard and you will see it. If you enter from the rear gate, it takes about fifteen minutes to go around.

When I was a student, I heard somewhere that cows might graze on this lawn at around four or five in the morning. I never had a chance to verify whether it was true before graduating.

When I first entered the main library, I thought, ‘Wow, is this high ceiling from the first floor to the fourth? It is so spectacular!’

Later, I discovered that the high-ceilinged part was only this entrance area and a small area near the third floor.

Because people from every floor come here to take phone calls, this high-ceilinged area is actually quite noisy.

If you want to sleep on the sofas here, I do not recommend it. Sleeping on sofas outside the high-ceilinged area is much better.

I heard that the first floor is now under renovation or something similar. In any case, it is completely empty now.

A librarian friend I know said that the work would apparently continue for quite a long time.

For some reason, I almost always take the stairs in the main library and rarely use the elevator.

Because the main library is a somewhat older library, you can clearly see traces of history everywhere.

During university, I hardly ever browsed these bookcases. The first time I looked through them seriously was in graduate school.

My previous advisor wanted to train me to find journals in the library, so the advisor deliberately chose an extremely old paper—the kind that could not possibly be found through Google Scholar.

The advisor then required me to find the paper in the library, print it, and bring it back.

The advisor did not actually expect me to read that paper, but I learned how to find journals and literature in a library. That skill remained very useful even when I was at the College of Law.

If I had to name an area of the main library where I particularly liked to read, I would choose this high-ceilinged section.

I remember finishing more than three hundred general-physics practice problems here, along with calculus and engineering-mathematics assignments.

The feeling of this high-ceilinged area is like being in a library overseas, and at times it even feels like being in a library in a magical world.

There are not always power outlets, and because the view is beautiful, the window seats are extremely difficult to get.

Another area where I often stayed was the laptop area outside the restroom.

The chairs here differ from those elsewhere. They are a little more modern and somewhat more comfortable, and the elevation makes the space feel freer.

It is also incredibly close to the restroom. You can leave your things for a moment, go to the restroom, and come back; it is a place where you can stay for a long time.

The drawback is that it is a little noisier because people often come to make phone calls in the stairwell.

I usually appeared in the other seating areas only when I came to study with people I knew. In fact, I rarely studied with friends during university.

Most of my courses were in the colleges of science and engineering. Because I took courses alone in other departments, I did not really have friends to study with, haha.

Later, when public-health and medical-school courses became more frequent in my second and third years, I came to the main library much less often.

If I had to name particularly sleep-friendly sofas, the sofas in the photograph above would be my first choice.

These sofas are not like the square sofas arranged around the entrance on every floor, where you might wake up and accidentally make eye contact with a stranger sitting opposite you. That would be awkward, haha.

They are genuinely comfortable for both sitting and lying down. Every time I finished lunch and had to wait for a two-o’clock experiment, I would always come to these seats for a serious nap.

The main library also has a basement-level-one self-study area. Even speaking in a whisper can upset someone there, and dropping a pen makes you feel as though the entire world will hear it.

You need to reserve a seat through the seat-allocation system to enter, and you cannot leave for too long.

I have not set foot in this place since my first year. The last time I heard about it was through the National Taiwan University discussion board, where law students were arguing at the entrance and even misremembered the number of a legal provision.

Thinking about it now, apart from frequently used provision numbers, I would probably misremember them too.

I remember that people argued most fiercely on the National Taiwan University discussion board about umbrellas often being taken by mistake. After that, I tried to bring an umbrella sleeve or shake the water off before taking my umbrella inside.

After arriving at National Chengchi University, I thought, ‘Surely there would be fewer people stealing umbrellas, right?’

Yet I often saw posts on its discussion board about all kinds of umbrellas being stolen as well. It really is much the same everywhere, haha.

General Education Building Open Learning Space

I discovered this open learning space after a drawing class, when I happened to pass the General Education Building and thought, ‘What used to be here? Why does it look completely different? Ah, it is the General Education Building!’

I decided to go inside for a look and discovered such a cool place.

When I come to National Taiwan University from time to time, I stop here to sit for a while, handle some work, and then head to my next destination.

I can no longer remember at all what the original General Education Building looked like.

This area currently seems to have a special checkpoint activity. Completing the related tasks earns you a lovely small gift.

It looks incredibly refined inside, almost like a lounge. It is not very noisy, though, and many people study and work here.

There is plenty of distance between tables, so it does not feel crowded. I sat down briefly and found the seats comfortable.

If you find the space noisy, you can also consider using a discussion room. On the day I went, almost all the discussion rooms were occupied, showing how actively they were used.

Conclusion

To be precise, there are very many places to study at National Taiwan University. The places introduced here are all quiet indoor spaces, but I have also studied or worked in places such as the Student Activity Center, the Second Student Activity Center, and even outdoor places such as Luming Square.

However, as a freelancer who can move freely without a fixed seat but still needs power outlets to work properly, I can hardly stay in any of those places for long.

Even in libraries, not every area has enough power outlets, and seats with outlets are often difficult to get. That is a significant drawback.

Still, I like the freedom of moving from place to place. Sometimes my work does not require an outlet, so I arrange my work according to the places I can go that day.

Overall, my favorite so far is probably still the Astronomy and Mathematics Library. It is close to the rear gate, convenient for meals, consistently not very crowded, and does not require much competition for seats.

This sharing series is finally approaching its last few articles. I will soon be free from the era of weekly updates and going out for field research, haha.

Finally, let me share the National Taiwan University pigeons, which are still enormous. On this visit, I found they were still so large that they were almost the size of chickens.

See you in the next article!

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