Cambridge University Libraries course timetable

The UL is unique: a national, legal deposit library with an amazing collection of around 8 million items - over two million of which you can browse on our open shelves. If that sounds a bit daunting, why not come on a brief orientation tour to help you find your way around? We’ll even tell you what we keep in the famous Library tower ...

Please note this tour does not cover the University's vast electronic and digital collections: to find out more about using these, please see check for courses on our timetable or ask a member of Library staff for help.

Learn how to search databases effectively, and cite references correctly using citation software. Get the most out of your literature search for your dissertations or major projects.

Please note: sessions for Pharmacology students will take place in the Cuthbert Room of the Pharmacology Department.

This session will develop skills that will help you get the most out of your literature review. From a foundation of effective search strategies, you will learn how to critically appraise academic literature, techniques for getting through sources quickly and evaluating their relevance, engaging with key material and beginning to write your literature review itself, as well as ensuring accuracy in your citations and references.

Please bring a laptop, tablet or other web-enabled device with you to the session.

Need help with iDiscover? Call in at the General Enquiries Helpdesk (on the landing above the Entrance Hall) where a member of Library staff will be able to help you search our print and online collections, answer any questions you have, or give you a general overview.

Every Friday between 9.00 and 10.15.

A course specifically for NHS staff. Attendees will learn how to search databases accessed with an Athens login (such as Medline, Embase and Cinahl) effectively and efficiently, to learn how to save searches and references, and to create and maintain a bibliography.

All attendees are required to have an NHS Athens login.

By law, a copy of every UK print publication must be given to the British Library by its publishers, and to five other major libraries, including Cambridge University Library, that request it. Since April 2013 Legal Deposit has included material published digitally and online.

Non-print Legal Deposit material is accessed via designated PCs in the University Library and Affiliated Libraries.

With the amount of material now deposited electronically increasing, the University Library is offering informal training sessions with staff from the Reference Department. Whether you require a general overview or have specific enquiries, these sessions will be of help to you.

A member of staff will be available from 11.30-12.00 every Wednesday. There is no need to book a place; please make yourself known to staff at the enquiry desk in the main Reading Room.

Learn how to search databases effectively, and cite references correctly using citation software. Get the most out of your literature search for your dissertations or major projects.

Please note: sessions for Pharmacology students will take place in the Cuthbert Room of the Pharmacology Department.

Finding secondary literature to inform and support your research is paramount to any higher-level research. This session focuses on the concepts as well as practical issues, to give participants a more comprehensive understanding of the issues and features of literature searching.

Please bring your own wifi-connected device, so that you can look at some of the platforms.

This session will introduce participants to the wide range of platforms and services that are available to help you manage your online presence as a researcher. We'll look at academic tools like ORCID, Google Scholar and ResearchGate/Academia.edu, as well as an overview of some of the more popular social media platforms. We'll also have discussions around issues such as the risks of sharing research through these platforms and reaching wider audiences. We will also show participants how to flip these tools and use them to access research for their own work too.

The UL is unique: a national, legal deposit library with an amazing collection of around 8 million items - over two million of which you can browse on our open shelves. If that sounds a bit daunting, why not come on a brief orientation tour to help you find your way around? We’ll even tell you what we keep in the famous Library tower ...

Please note this tour does not cover the University's vast electronic and digital collections: to find out more about using these, please see check for courses on our timetable or ask a member of Library staff for help.

This session introduces participants to the importance of good referencing practices within their work. The University of Cambridge’s position on plagiarism will be presented before moving on to a discussion around good referencing techniques, using the Harvard referencing style as an example. Participants will see a live demonstration of the reference management tool Zotero before taking part in a quiz to consolidate their knowledge.

This session will take place in the Pink Room. If this session is fully booked please join the waiting list - we will move venues if there is demand.

How to take the bile out of your bibliography, and ensure that it's not the most time-consuming part of your work. A variety of tools will be showcased: EndNote, EndNoteWeb, Zotero, Mendeley.

This event will allow participants to explore lots of different tools and resources that can help them with their work at Cambridge.

Tools and resources on offer include:

• reference management software (Zotero & Mendeley)
• sharing your work (blogging & Twitter)
• managing your time and work (Trello & cloud storage)
• presenting your work (Canva & Creative Commons images)

Participants will be able to rotate between different areas to hear short presentations (15 mins) and explore tools that they want to know more about. Handouts on all the tools and resources on offer will be available. The event will be led by librarians from across the Cambridge University Libraries community.

Participants can drop in to the event at any convenient time but we do encourage you to book so we can have an idea of numbers. All are welcome but this event will have a particular relevance for STEMM graduate students and researchers.

You do not have to stay for the full event duration.

Refreshments will be available on a first come, first served basis. Support for this event has been provided by the Researcher Development Programme.

This session explores why you should share your all research as widely as possible and how you can go about doing so. It will demonstrate the potential that Open Research can have in maximising exposure for your work and how you can track and trace how your research is being shared online.

Please bring your own internet-enabled device to this session.

The UL is unique: a national, legal deposit library with an amazing collection of around 8 million items - over two million of which you can browse on our open shelves. If that sounds a bit daunting, why not come on a brief orientation tour to help you find your way around? We’ll even tell you what we keep in the famous Library tower ...

Please note this tour does not cover the University's vast electronic and digital collections: to find out more about using these, please see check for courses on our timetable or ask a member of Library staff for help.

A course designed to take you step-by-step through academic writing and publication, with tips and resources to make writing up as simple as possible. The course will demystify the peer-review process, and help you to improve the precision and clarity of your academic writing.

Need help with iDiscover? Call in at the General Enquiries Helpdesk (on the landing above the Entrance Hall) where a member of Library staff will be able to help you search our print and online collections, answer any questions you have, or give you a general overview.

Every Friday between 9.00 and 10.15.

By law, a copy of every UK print publication must be given to the British Library by its publishers, and to five other major libraries, including Cambridge University Library, that request it. Since April 2013 Legal Deposit has included material published digitally and online.

Non-print Legal Deposit material is accessed via designated PCs in the University Library and Affiliated Libraries.

With the amount of material now deposited electronically increasing, the University Library is offering informal training sessions with staff from the Reference Department. Whether you require a general overview or have specific enquiries, these sessions will be of help to you.

A member of staff will be available from 11.30-12.00 every Wednesday. There is no need to book a place; please make yourself known to staff at the enquiry desk in the main Reading Room.

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.

Before undertaking any piece of primary research it’s important to be aware of as much of the existing literature as possible. A systematic literature review can also be a research end in itself. And it’s not something to be taken lightly. But how can you be sure you’re being as rigorous as necessary? How can you manage the references you find, document the process, and also know when to stop searching?

An introduction to the UL's Rare Books Reading Room and its collections, which include material from the first European printing presses and from the wider world up to the present day.