On Aug. 24, 2026, library staff counted 44 people in the McDermott Library at 9 p.m. By midnight there were only two left.
That night, which marked the first day of the fall semester, falls in line with current usage trends in the library — thousands of students will use the library during the day, but as the night goes on, the building empties. Library leadership started off the fall 2026 semester asking how long a building that services thousands of students a day should stay open for only a handful of late-night stragglers?
On Oct. 1, the library answered that question with updated hours; the library will now close at midnight from Monday through Wednesday, at 8 p.m. on Fridays and Sundays and at 6 p.m. on Saturdays.
“It’s a struggle to stay open so late with our current staff,” McDermott Library Dean Ellen Safley said.
What the numbers show
Assistant Library Director for Public Services Travis Goode said that the library keeps track of the number of people who use it in two key ways: the security gates into the library keep track of every scan into the building, and the library has its staff do a headcount every evening to see who is still in the building late at night. The Retrograde analyzed data from both sources, provided by the library, from Aug. 2025 through the end of Aug. 2026.
The data shows roughly 492,000 total unique scan-ins over the past year. Traffic peaked in September and October, when the library averaged a little over 2,600 scans every day. Mondays through Thursdays averaged 3,750 unique scan-ins during those months, and the single busiest day in the past year was Sept. 15, 2025, with 4,312 unique library visitors.
Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays were consistently the library’s busiest days with a unique scan-in average ranging from 1,801 to 1,952. Tuesday is on average the busiest day of the week for the library and usership slowly declines as the weekend approaches. Fridays typically mark the first big shift in library usage since average unique scan-ins drop to 954. Weekends are even quieter since Saturday and Sunday respectively average 179 and 176 unique scan-ins throughout the year.
Goode said the library also uses a bluetooth occupancy system that provides an estimate of library guests based on the devices in the building, which Goode noted was not as reliable as the other data collection systems the library used. Goode said that the library’s bluetooth occupancy system consistently reported the period between 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. as the busiest for the building.
Safley and Goode said that the low overnight headcounts played a role in the final decision to cut library hours after midnight. Across 118 counted nights, the library averaged about 78 people at 11 p.m., 50 at midnight and 28 at 1 a.m. Those 11 p.m. crowds on-average amounted to about 2.7% of an average day’s card scans.
Overnight use varied throughout the year with April being the quietest month averaging 66 library users at 11 p.m. while December was the busiest with an average of 94 people in the library at 11 p.m.
24/7 during finals?
The McDermott library has always promised to stay open 24 hours a day during finals, but low student usage has challenged the library’s commitment to this service. Goode said that the library didn’t see “a huge demand for the 24 hour service.”
Safley said that various factors were contributing to the lower finals week library turnout, but that she largely saw the source as being faculty giving exams out earlier.
“We’ve always promised to be open 24 hours during finals, but a lot of faculty give their tests the week before,” Safley said. “It just seems like when we offer to be open, it was always busier, maybe the week before.”
Late-night headcount data from the past year lends additional credence to this view. The first two days of fall finals last year saw an average of 61 late-night visitors; in contrast, the last three days of finals week had as few as six average late-night visitors with a high of 18 visitors on average. Average late-night usage the week before finals hovered around 90 to 100 nightly visitors. The spring finals week had a similar disparity with an average of 56 or less students while the averages for the week before ranged between 82 to 134 students.
Safley said that 24-hour access was particularly hard with the McDermott Library’s relatively flat budget. The library’s budget has been largely unchanged since 2021, with roughly $10 million allocated to it each year. Safley said that on top of being a financial struggle, the 24/7 model during finals created issues for her staff since many had to suddenly “alter their own work life” to cover extended hours which stretched until 7 a.m. each day of finals.
Why closing the building is hard
Safley said that closing a building as big as McDermott took more than just locking the doors.
“When we leave here at two o’clock in the morning, there’s two people working a service desk and one student, but we can’t close a building this big with just them,” Safley said.”The police have agreed to help close the building, but now we have lieutenants saying that they don’t know how much longer they are going to do it.”
Safley said that the alternative to UTD PD would be hiring a guard, which she said would cost about $60,000 a year and would have to come out of the library’s own budget.
“I don’t have that money in my budget to do it,” Safley said.
The library’s money problems are broader than any one position. The budget has stayed flat at roughly $10 million since at least 2021, which is as far back as the university’s public budget reports go. Safley said she estimated that it has been about eight years total of this budget stagnation. Safley said that raises are funded separately, but the rest of the budget depends on student fees, so falling enrollment or fewer credit hours per student directly cut into the funds available to the library each year. The student fee that supports the library is $14.50 per credit hour. Safley said that earlier this year, the library had requested to increase the fee to $17 per credit hour, but that it didn’t go through since “the governor vetoed them all.”
At the same time, costs keep rising. Safely said that electronic journals cost about $4 million, and prices climb 2.5% to 5% a year. The library is also buying commercial data sets requested by the business school, which now cost about $1.1 million. To cover these growing costs, the library has had to cut its book budget by over 65% in the last year.
Safely said that the choice to close the library earlier was a difficult one, but that current financial restraints made it impossible for the library to continue its previous late-night hours of operation without a major change or an increase in budget. Goode said the choice on when to cut hours relied on the library’s internal data about usage.
“Whatever we pick, there’s going to be people that need [the library] to be open at a different time,” Safely said. “This is hectic for everyone.”