Residential Life

Alternative library resources

By Yiorgos 29 Apr 2020

Most libraries have unfortunately shut down as part of the measures taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19. This can be particularly problematic for students needing to access reading material, especially postgraduate research students. In light of this, many publishers have made content and resources freely available on the internet.

First line should be accessing resources through your member institution’s library search (member universities). From experience, they tend to include and be updated with the latest of free resources, with direct links to the article, journal or book. While there are many member universities part of UoL, here are the links to the relevant posts from the library services:

UCL (https://library-guides.ucl.ac.uk/az.php?s=130207)
King’s (https://libguides.kcl.ac.uk/covid/home)

Moreover, here are some specific links for big publishers and other libraries. You may need to use your OpenAthens or Shibboleth accounts for your university, so make sure you know the account details for those (tend to be the same as your university account).

Senate House Library (SHL)

You need your SHL account to log in but they have thousands of online journals and e-resources available. If you don’t have an account, you can still sign up for membership (for free if part of a member college).

More details: https://london.ac.uk/senate-house-library/our-collections/databases-and-eresources/accessing-eresources

Membership: https://london.ac.uk/senate-house-library/membership

Cambridge University Press

CUP have made many of their textbooks available in html format for students. This is done via Cambridge Core, their online webpage of books. There are some journals as well.

More info can be found here: https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/covid-19-resources-and-information

And here https://www.cambridge.org/about-us/covid-19/

Oxford University Press

OUP have made some of their resources freely available via Kortext or Bibliu for the UK. More information and links to both of these services: https://global.oup.com/about/covid19?cc=gb

Project Muse

This is a project by John Hopkins University in the US and has many resources coming from American universities. Access to this may vary between member institutions but at time of writing, UCL login works on this.

https://about.muse.jhu.edu/resources/freeresourcescovid19/

Hope this is a good starting point. If you are looking for something specific, I would suggest don’t accept you can’t access it until you’ve explored the option of accessing it through the publisher as well as your own university’s library services.