Supporting students and academic researchers
Using the Reading Rooms
We welcome anyone who needs to do research in our Reading Rooms in London or Yorkshire. For the London Reading Rooms at St Pancras and Colindale, you’ll need a free Reader Pass, which you can obtain on your first visit – just make sure you bring along the correct ID. More information
Training days and research visits
Our Postgraduate Research Training Days offer specially tailored workshops and networking opportunities, focusing on your research subject, to help you get the most out of our resources and facilities. Training Days are offered in history, modern foreign languages, English literature, social sciences, creative research and entrepreneurship.
For larger groups, if the Training Days do not meet your requirements, we may be able to offer groups visits.
Finding the material you need
Our main Integrated Catalogue contains records for 14 million books, serials, printed music and maps. If you have a Reader Pass, you can order items in advance of your visit to our Reading Rooms.
Other specialist catalogues are also available on the web: for example, the Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, and the English Short Title Catalogue.
For journal articles and conference proceedings, search the British Library Direct database of 20,000 research journals for free. Order the full text articles via your free university library Zetoc service or purchase them direct from the database using your credit card.
Digitised Collections for Higher Education
The Archival Sound Recordings website offers registered UK Higher Education users over 4,000 hours of recorded sound, free on the web. The collection includes music, oral history, animal sounds, radio drama and dialect recordings. Download any of the 12,000 sounds to support your research.
Over 3 million digitised pages of British newspapers – local, regional and national - are available to all in UK further and higher education. The collection includes 2 million pages of 19th-century titles and the entire Burney collection of 1,270 titles from the 17th and 18th centuries. Available in the Library’s Reading Rooms or via your university library.
Inspiration from the Collection
Everyone is welcome to visit the public spaces and exhibition galleries at the Library, but postgraduate students and academic researchers are invited to explore the collections in more depth through one of our Higher Education activities.
For example:
- Religious Studies and Theology researchers recently viewed the Sacred exhibition in the company of our expert curators
- Postgraduate students were challenged to design a piece of work embracing the spirit of the avant garde, in a competition to support the Breaking the Rules exhibition.
- A recent Study Day explored the various movements that made up the European Avant Garde. Organised in partnership with the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, and including talks by leading academics.
- The Walks & Talks programme invites postgraduate students to join a free guided walk around King’s Cross and Bloomsbury, finishing at the Library to learn more about how we can support your research.
Collaborative Research
We participate in collaborative research activities in the Arts & Humanities and in the Social Sciences. We have Independent Research Organisation status with the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Currently we co-supervise several CASE and University of Sheffield PhD students, and collaborate on research projects such as Italian Academies and Digital Lives.
