One-to-one enquiries with a Librarian

Students can request an appointment with a Librarian in the Academic Liaison team. Librarians can help with a wide range of things, including:

• Helping you identify the keyword and phrases for your topic and advising on the search techniques to ensure your searching is efficient and effective in finding the best resources for your dissertation.
• Ensuring you can make use of all the online and specialist resources for you subject, advising on the best databases for your dissertation, and how to make use of these.
• Getting access to resources beyond the Library's collections.
• Advice on referencing resources and/or using reference management software.

Email Library@st-andrews.ac.uk to request an appointment.

Subject Guides

To help you find the databases and online resources recommended for your subject we have created Subject Guides.  Your Subject Guide will include:

• The contact details for the Librarian for your subject.  You can contact the Librarian for advise on which resources are likely to be best in your case, and for support using these, one-to-one training can be provided using Teams for anything you need help with using in your Subject Guide
• Details of the databases available within your subject, with links to access them.
• Information about resources used within your subject, such as primary sources, data and statistical sources, newspapers, etc.

Accessing materials beyond the Library's collections

In the course of your research you may come across resources the Library doesn't have access to. There are a range of services offered to try to get access to these:

• Journal articles can be obtained through the Inter-Library Loans service.  These are normally emailed to you as PDFs.  See the Inter-Library Loans page for further information, and a link to make a request.
• Scan of a chapter.  If the Library doesn't have a book in the collection, and you know you just need a chapter you can use the Inter-Library Loans service to obtain a scan of the chapter.  Copyright permits that you can request 1 chapter or 10% of a book, whichever is greatest.  To submit a chapter scan request use the Inter-Library Loans service, choose the 'Book' option and tick the box "I only need a specific chapter or pages, up to 10% of total work" to request a chapter.  Chapters are normally emailed to you as PDFs.
• Request the loan of a book - submit an Inter-Library Loan request and we'll try to obtain the book on loan from another Library.  Use this service if you need more than 1 chapter of the book. Books are supplied as print books, ebooks cannot currently be provided on Inter-Library Loan.
• Submit a book recommendation form if you think you will need to consult the book for a prolonged period, the Library will consider purchasing the book.  

If you have questions about obtaining resources email library@st-andrews.ac.uk.