All university libraries in Germany are open to the general public if you have an ID card/passport.

For some libraries you have to pay a small fee to get an access card. The mentioned Grimm Zentrum/HU library is free of charge:

"The Humboldt University Library is a scientific library open to the general public. Every person over sixteen years of age and resident in Germany may register to use it in accordance with the Library's Benutzungsordnung (Regulations of Use)." => see http://www.ub.hu-berlin.de/using-the-library/registration

Some libraries limit the borrowing of books (depends on the library) to university members (usually because of high demand) but you can almost always read the book while at the library.

Of course it's not allowed to do commercial work like coding on your startup, but if you don't annoy the people, probably nobody will care...

To work at Grimm Library, you don't even need an id or anything. Just go there. But they have some rules about main times of the day like 8-19 reserved for actual students - although I never experienced anybody controlling it.

I go there for anti-procrastination as well, it's great.

Some of the university libraries in Berlin are quite strict about what you're allowed to bring in (ie, no bags of any size). Fortunately, the Amerika-Gedenk-Bibliothek is close by and if they have such policies, they certainly don't enforce them.

Haven't been to the Grimm yet, but I remember passing by on the S-Bahn maybe a year ago and being excited about the huge new library under construction...I'm not in Mitte very often.

… and those rules are quite often not strictly enforced. It’s usually no problem for anyone to walk right in and start reading books. As long as you behave appropriately for a library it’s no problem.

In the US it depends, but I'd venture a guess and say most public university libraries are open at least regularly to the general public. Most of the schools in my state are on this [1] list, and most law libraries I've encountered are also open to the public as well. After hours access is usually restricted to those with a library card though.

[1] http://www.gpoaccess.gov/libraries.html

Apparently gpoaccess is no longer being updated and is shutting down in 2012. It looks like the new system is:

http://catalog.gpo.gov/fdlpdir/FDLPdir.jsp?mode=-2

At my university everybody can just walk into the library during normal hours. After that, you need a (photo id) library card (which you can get right there in the library for 10 euros). This card not only allows you 24 hour access to the building itself, but to also loan books, get access to journals and newspapers, etc... I certainly can't speak for every university library here in germany, but I have so far seen quite a few (visiting friends all over germany), where this is common practice (I do not know about getting a library card there, though).

Wow, 24 hour access? Damn.

I feel like in the states it really varies. Brown university and RISD (down the hill) both require a Brown or RISD ID to get in but in high school in Seattle I did all of my research for history in University of Washington's largest library which is open to the public. I sometimes wish any of these were open 24 hours though.

I grew up in a US college town. As a high school student (or any state resident I think) I could just go in and get a library card, and check out books. Anyone can get into the library, even without a card. Some caveats, it's a public university, and the main library was wide open, but there are also several small libraries strewn about campus (engineering, geology, chemistry, etc) that you may or may not have to swipe to get into. I think once you get a card, you can get in though, as I remember getting a card to getin into the earth sciences library for a high school project.

I can't speak for Germany, but in the United States practices vary. You can't just walk into the library at the University of Wisconsin, but at North Carolina State you can.

Even in the case of Wisconsin, it looks like state residents can get a membership on a reasonably cheap yearly fee. Though I didn't see it mentioned, I'd assume this would include building access during normal hours. (Though perhaps that's a bad assumption?)

http://library.wisc.edu/visitors/borrow.html#wiscres

Informally, I checked the websites of a handful of state universities, and all had some way for residents to obtain borrowing privileges. It's far from a comprehensive survey, and I may be wrong in my assumption that borrowing privileges would allow normal building access. Still, at first glance it seems promising.

As the other kind reply to your comment said, sometimes access to open stacks and circulating privileges are distinct. Here in Minnesota, any member of the general public can enter the open stacks of all the University of Minnesota Libraries. I can readily gain circulating privileges as a "friend of the library" for a small fee, made smaller in my case because there is discounted membership fee for being a friend of the library for members of the University of Minnesota Alumni Association.

When I lived in Washington State, I had no particular connection with U Dub, but I could also walk onto campus and walk into the library shelving areas with no problem. When I wanted to circulate books, I looked up the state administrative regulations (it helped that I was working as a lawyer, so I knew how to look those up) and found out that a state regulation basically allows most state residents to obtain circulating privileges at University of Washington libraries for the payment of a small fee. That library has a GREAT collection of materials on east Asian languages, and I circulated some of those while I was living in Washington state.

You _can_ just walk into the library at the University of Wisconsin. There is only one library on the Madison campus (Memorial Library) that requires an ID to enter. That leaves 49 other libraries on campus open to anyone.

Fair enough, I was thinking of Memorial. And, for that matter, I was thinking of one particular library at NC State which may have been for math and science only.

Nah, at NC State, D. H. Hill (the main library) is open to the public during normal hours. The "satellite libraries" are Design, Textiles, Natural Resources, and Veterinary Medicine, and I'm not sure whether those are open access or not.

I also don't know whether the new Hunt Engineering Library is going to be public access or not, but I hope it will be because it's going to be awesome.

Most university libraries in Canada are open to the public. I didn't realize how much I should appreciate this. My partner and I work at the nearby (well, by Canadian standards) uni library once or twice a week. I look forward to those times. We even went through a couple-month period of going there every day, but that had too much time-overhead.

What I learned about this new library afterwards: it was allowed before it got too crowded and university members couldn't get workplaces anymore (they have about 1,250 places and 30,000 students). So now, you can enter the library as a non-student, rent books but you are not allowed to use the workplaces (they check at times if your student-id is laid out on the desk but they didn't when I've been there)

Exeter University is open to the public, although they've just done massive amounts of work on it and I don't know how it's turned out.

It might be worth taking another look at your nearest Uni library, as I think quite a few are similar to Exeter/Durham, at least in the day and if you don't want to take out books.

My local university is Lincoln and I'm on campus every now and then as I have friends who work in their enterprise park. They have an excellent and reasonably new library but you need a student card to even get in since they put barcode scanner gates in when they built it. Their Web site notes this also :-(

That said, I might go and explicitly ask sometime, as there may be an unpublicised way around the problem.

Some Australian University libraries are open access (Sydney Uni if I remember correctly), but others have card-only access points out the wazoo.

(I can't get into UTS' library anymore; my old student card must apparently be blocked now.)

Yeah, at least at Latrobe an rmit there doesn't seem to be any reason why you can't, apart from probably having to bring your own connectivity. I don't see them actively encouraging it but not policing it either.

Here in Durham the University and cathedral libraries are open to local residents to use. I'd recommend visiting the cathedral one if you're ever here, it's an amazing place to study.