All Cambridge University Libraries courses

Come to the Library’s Historical Printing Room. Set your name in type and hand-print an illustrated keepsake as a memento of your visit.

On top of the millions of books held at the University Library, we also have a considerable collection of printing artefacts. This began with a decision in the early 1970s to set up a bibliographical teaching press on the lines of those already existing at the Bodleian, University College London and elsewhere. The impetus for this plan came from the late Philip Gaskell, then Librarian of Trinity College. The main aim was to enable students of literature to understand the practical details of hand composition of type and of printing on a hand-press, and thus to appreciate the ways in which both conscious decisions and accidents in the printing house could affect the accuracy of a text.

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/departments/rare-books/collections/historical-printing-room

Take a break from revision stress with a twenty minute guided tour of the famous UL Tower. An experienced member of staff will take you up one of Cambridge's tallest structures where you can experience dazzling views of Cambridge as well as seeing some of the unique material that the tower holds.

Please be aware that access to the Tower is by lift/elevator only.

Bringing collaboration in early research and research communications squarely into the open research movement has the potential to bring real benefits; from speeding up discovery in research by making more aspects of the production of research available to other researchers; to providing recognition to more component parts of the research process; to helping to disrupt and improve the article publishing model to making interdisciplinary work less challenging and more impactful. But what are the barriers and how can the research community overcome them in partnership with publishers and other stakeholders?

This workshop will have 3 parts:

• An update on how the Press is working to encourage collaboration around big research questions at the intersections of research fields in order to open up a conversation with the University research community. A brief introduction will share examples where the Press is challenging the traditional reward structures around article publishing, facilitating bottom-up interactions in the production of research on their new open research platform Cambridge Open Engage and highlights from recent market research they’ve conducted.

• Generate a list of shared barriers to collaboration across participants

• Discuss how making collaboration more open could tackle some of those barriers, the benefits of making collaboration more open, and specific ways that the stakeholders in the conference (researcher, publisher, library, etc.) could support a move towards openness like this.

Collecting impact evidence from social media of publications, conference papers or any other scholarly output can be complicated and time-consuming. In this session, we'll introduce you to a number of tools that can help to streamline and simplify these processes: IFTTT, Twitter analytics, Altmetric and ImpactStory.

Read and research in an East Asian language? Visit the UL’s Aoi Pavilion with over 300,000 volumes written in Japanese, Chinese, or Korean. You will see the East Asian Reading Room and Aoi bookstacks. You will learn how to find books in the open stacks and how to request them from closed stacks.

This tour will include some main areas of the UL, but readers primarily interested in English or European collections should join an ‘Orientation Tour’ instead.

Cambridge University Library is one of the top research libraries in the world and holds over 8 million items. If you are a member of Library staff at a college, department or faculty library and would like to give your students introductory tours of the UL, then we would love to help you gain the knowledge and confidence to do that.

Email us today (research-skills@lib.cam.ac.uk) to organise a one-to-one tour with an experienced member of UL staff. We will guide you through the orientation tour route that we use for our own tours and can answer any questions that you may have.

Cambridge University Library is one of the top research libraries in the world and holds over 8 million items. If you are a member of Library staff at a college, department or faculty library and would like to give your students introductory tours of the UL, then we would love to help you gain the knowledge and confidence to do that.

Email us today (research-skills@lib.cam.ac.uk) to get started. We can give advice via email or by telephone (including sharing our tour notes and guidance) or we can organise a one-to-one tour for you with an experienced member of UL staff. We will guide you through the orientation tour route that we use for our own tours and can answer any questions that you may have.

Drop in for a chat with a member of the Biological Sciences Libraries Team:

We can help you with lots of things including:

• referencing
• getting to grips with critical reading
• understanding your recommended reading
• finding books and digital content
• successfully executing a literature search
• and much more!

If we can't answer your question in the session, we'll take your details and investigate it further for you!

• Nervous or intimidated about visiting the UL for the first time?
• Don’t know where to begin with a Literature search?
• Can never find the books you need on the open shelves?

Ask a librarian!

Individual or small group supervision style sessions tailored to your needs. Available online or face-to-face.

If you would prefer a different day or time, email readerservices@cam.ac.uk to arrange a session. Tell us what you need help with and we’ll match you with a member of library staff who can show you what you need to know, whether it’s searching the catalogue, using Electronic Legal Deposit, finding open shelf books or something else entirely.

Don't suffer in silence - Ask a Librarian!

This session will give a brief overview of several tools that can be used for collaborative research. Participants will be introduced to Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs), collaborative online writing tools such as Overleaf, OneNote and Evernote, before finishing with a look at GitHub.