Library services to support you in Lent Term 2023
A round-up of highlights to get your year off to a flying start.
Welcome to Lent Term 2023!
Our new year’s resolution is to help you discover more of this…
- get confident exploring and using our electronic collections
- enhance your study skills with our selection of training and workshops
- explore the non-print material we collect through electronic legal deposit
- get resources faster than ever with our document delivery services
- tell us what you think about draft policy to help you publish open access by retaining your rights rather than signing them over to publishers
- let us know your experiences of library services at the University
- visit the UL and try out The Tea Room, browse our shop, or join our Really Popular Book Club.
Electronic collections
In addition to the physical collections, your libraries help you access tens of millions of electronic articles, books, journals, scores and other e-resources.
We’re continually adding to these electronic collections, which support every discipline. You’ll find newspapers, books, periodicals and bibliographies, along with digital archives, data sets and collections of primary sources.
Your Faculty and Department library (FDL) is a great place to get help with searching the electronic collections in your subject area.
Maybe you’re looking to compare financial data from companies across the globe, or perhaps you need to locate primary sources documenting the history of the Americas over four centuries?
Whatever your area of study, speak to your librarians, and browse your FDL website and LibGuides to start exploring.
Our Electronic Collections Management team regularly post tips and announce new resources on their blog.
Check out their ‘How to’ guides on using electronic resources, and the 2022 Advent Calendar will give you a head start with 24 quick but unmissable e-resource recommendations.
The ebooks blog similarly offers information and updates about new ebooks, and you can find advice on finding and using this content in the ebooks LibGuide.
Follow @ebookscamb and @ejournalscamb on Twitter so that you never miss an update about new resources to support your work. These accounts also let you know if there are any issues affecting access to these resources and update you as soon as these have been resolved.
Study skills
We want to make the experience of learning in Cambridge the best it can be, and our libraries provide guidance and advice for students, researchers and teaching staff across all the disciplines.
The catalogue is hosted in Moodle, where you can browse a one-stop shop of relevant study support and materials for your learning and practice.
Explore resources and workshops available to all current University members. From library orientation to referencing help, navigating scholarly articles to getting started with peer review, the training we provide helps you to build your confidence as well as equipping you with essential skills to help manage the requirements of your course.
Our top tip for this term? Use the search term '1-2-1' in the study skills catalogue to discover opportunities for bespoke consultations with your library staff.
Electronic legal deposit
The UL is one of the UK and Ireland’s 6 Legal Deposit Libraries, and has been entitled to request every publication in both the UK and Ireland since 1710.
In 2023, we’re marking ten years since ‘legal deposit’ was extended to include material published digitally and online. We’ll be celebrating how this enables the Legal Deposit Libraries to provide a national archive of the UK’s non-print published material, such as websites, blogs, ejournals, ebooks, and CD-ROMs – look out for more news on this later in the year.
You may have encountered material in this format, which can be read ‘on designated PCs’ around the libraries.
Document delivery services
There are many services available to you to find and use resources in the format you need.
We can help you get copies of material for accessible learning, and order high quality reproductions of material for publication.
Our inter-library loans services help you locate material outside our collections.
The following short video takes you on a tour of your options...
Self-archiving: an additional way to publish open access
We want to hear thoughts from our research community as we develop a self-archiving policy for the University of Cambridge.
The self-archiving policy would enable you to retain rights that you currently sign over to publishers, and will provide an additional route to open access for your research articles. We’ve drawn on learning from the ongoing Rights Retention Pilot to draft a policy, and now invite your comments.
We also invite you to join us at a virtual briefing to explore the proposed policy to ask questions and give your feedback on 25 January or 1 February.
Cambridge libraries survey 2023
This term we’d love to hear your experiences of using library services at the University.
The Cambridge libraries survey will run from Monday 13 February to Friday 3 March, and we’ll be asking how you find accessing information, resources, help and training opportunities in our libraries, as well as what you think about library spaces.
Look out for your invitation to complete the survey in February - we want to hear from current staff and students at the University as well as our other users, including NHS staff.
Respond to the survey and you’ll have the chance to win one of ten £50 Love Cambridge vouchers.
Be part of our community
Have you heard the buzz? The UL Tea Room is back! So many of you have told us how much you value it as a place to meet friends and share ideas, and we are truly delighted to let you know that our new team from BaxterStorey are now serving barista coffee and a daily-changing variety of sandwiches, paninis, snacks and cakes.
Serving hours in term time are 9am to 3pm, Monday to Friday. On Saturdays and outside term, serving ends at 2pm.
You are welcome to use The Tea Room to socialise or work – find it on the first floor of the North Wing.
If you’re visiting, check out the ‘Tea Room Bookshelves’ - a celebration of books written in and about the University and its libraries. Many are written by our readers, students, staff and library community. We’re exploring many of these together in our 'Really Popular Book Club' - you are warmly invited to join our special guests online each month.
Book your place at our Really Popular Book Club
Book your place at our Really Popular Book Club
You'll find book club texts, along with gifts inspired by our collections and research, in our beautiful Entrance Hall shop.
The year ahead is packed with exciting events and exhibitions – discover what’s in store at the UL, and keep up to date with our calendar of events on our What’s On pages.
We’re also looking forward to visiting fabulous exhibitions put together by all the libraries across the University to highlight their unique collections and focused support.
See you in the libraries over the coming weeks!
Published 17 January 2023
Unless otherwise credited, images are by Alice Boagey @AliceTheCamera for Cambridge University Libraries
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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