The Library is trialling Screen Studies from Monday 9th October until Friday 8th December.
Screen Studies is a dynamic digital platform designed to support moving-image studies. It offers a broad range of content including books, screenplays, overview articles and learning resources from Bloomsbury, Faber & Faber, the British Film Institute, Focal Press and Auteur (LUP). Screen Studies covers cinema, its history and the surrounding context from 1850 to the present day.
Naxos Music Library is the most comprehensive collection of classical music available online. Currently, it offers over 2,831,415 tracks of fine recorded music.
Naxos Music Library Jazz is a comprehensive collection of Jazz music available online. Over 28,952 albums (272,292 tracks) are available and new albums are added weekly.
Naxos Works Database is your trusted resource for information about vocal, chamber and orchestral works. Use the database to find details about composers and their works, instrumentations, durations, publishers and work introductions.
Naxos Video Library is a performing arts video library with over 4362 operas, ballets, documentaries, concerts, masterclasses, competition and musical tour videos as well as footage taken from recording sessions.
OUP Law Trove has become part of Newcastle Law School life. For any new students joining us this year, what is it? Well, it’s a collection of e-books you will need to support your learning in the core modules of your degree programme.
This Oxford University Press e-book resource contains most of the essential, recommended and background reading titles you will find listed in your Newcastle Law School module handbooks. You can also find these on the Law Library shelves, and having these books available online too can be really convenient to you as a student.
If you’re asking yourself if you need to buy your course texts for 2023/24 then we can’t answer that question for you. The answer really depends on you. Ask yourself: can you work with e-books? Do you prefer to have your own copy of a book so you can fold pages, write notes in the margins or use a highlighter to annotate the text (*librarians across the world gasp in horror!*). Can the University Library provide a copy of the book you need to use? (We’ll answer that for you! We can’t provide a copy of every single book to every single student even if we wanted to.) We do advise you to try OUP Law Trove to see how easy it is to access, and how versatile it can be (including annotating the text!). It may just save you spending money on books where you don’t need to.
OUP Law Trove is mobile responsive, catering for those students with mobile devices. You can also use a Campus PC, or borrow a laptop from one of the libraries to access this resource.
Logging in You can access OUP Law Trove directly via Library Search (log in with your Campus ID & password), via your Reading Lists in your Canvas modules, and directly too. You can also go to OUP Law Trove and use the ‘Sign in via your Institution’ option in the left-hand login box on the homepage, and search for Newcastle University.
Further guidance on logging in is provided by OUP in this video (1:05 mins):
Searching From the OUP Law Trove home page you can immediately select to view those titles included in our subscription.
You can search OUP Law Trove by subject by using the browse option from the home page, or search by term for any author, title or keyword.
NB The results retrieved from either search will include all chapters and books related to your subject or search term, in alphabetical order.
Using the options in the left hand menu, you can narrow your choices by searching for a term within your results, by selecting the format of the results you want to see, or the availability (it makes sense to select those that are unlocked or free if you have not selected to view those titles included in our subscription) and updating your search.
Further guidance on accessing and navigating books within Law Trove is provided by OUP in these videos (2:28 mins and 2:41 mins):
Personalisation You can create a Personal Profile to experience the full functionality of OUP Law Trove, including bookmarking and annotating (without writing on your books!). Click the ‘Sign In or Create’ button on the top menu bar and follow the instructions to set up your profile.
Once active you can access your saved content, searches and annotations quickly and easily.
Further information on the benefits of creating and using the Personal Profiles feature is provided by OUP in this video (1:54 mins):
Reading Lists and Handouts You may find your module teaching staff are using the DOI: for a specific book or chapter from your Reading List or module handout. What’s a DOI? A Digital Object Identifier. It’s a ‘permalink’ (permanent link) to the specific materials you need to read and looks like a weblink (which it is, essentially). If it doesn’t directly link to OUP Law Trove then add https://dx.doi.org/ to create the full DOI link. You will still be asked to login using your Newcastle University Campus ID & password to gain access to the materials.
Tips Search OUP Law Trove directly for your resources if you can. Library Search and your module Reading Lists are linking to most of the books, and some of the chapters available, but not all. You may find more resources by performing a keyword search; the results could show a useful chapter in another book that you would never have thought to search in.
You have access to some great employability and study skills information in OUP Law Trove too. Whether you are wondering what academic writing actually is, how to write a case note, how to prepare for a moot or dealing with an exam, there are materials in Trove to assist you alongside the Academic Skills Kit made available to you by the University, the University Library and the Academic Skills Team.
Finally, scroll to the bottom of the contents page of a book to see if there are additional resources available:
Further information on the online resources, including multiple choice questions (MCQs), is provided by OUP in this video (1:47 mins):
We think you will find OUP Law Trove very useful in supporting your studies at Newcastle Law School. If you have any feedback or questions, please leave a comment or contact libraryhelp@ncl.ac.uk.
After a trial of several AM (Adam Matthews) Collections modules earlier in 2023, the Library has acquired two new resources – Empire Online, and Church Missionary Society Periodicals 1 & 2.
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Church Missionary Society Periodicals digitises publications from the CMS, South American Missionary Society and Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, encompassing issues from 1816-2009. Thousands of pages with detailed metadata enable new research opportunities in the fields of missiology and world Christianity, as well as a unique perspective on global history and cultural encounter.
The documents include reports on missionary work, serialised journals and letters, birth, marriage, and death announcements, fiscal reports and reflections on worship, making them an extremely rich source.
Empire Online is an interactive collection of primary source documents sourced from leading archives around the world. Material in the collection spans five centuries, charting the story of the rise and fall of empires; from the explorations of Columbus, Captain Cook, and others, right through to de-colonisation in the second half of the twentieth century and debates over American Imperialism.
The wealth of documents spans five centuries and includes manuscripts, rare printed materials, letterbooks, periodicals, diaries, photographs and more.
Material in Empire Online has been sourced from a wide range of reputable institutions, with a particularly strong core of documents and images from the British Library. However, the focus is not only on the British Empire; there are a number of documents and secondary resources which relate the story of the Empire from the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German points of view, as well as that of indigenous peoples from Africa, India and North America.
For both databases, you could start by heading to the Introduction tab for an overview on the collection, a handy tour of the website and its key features, and information on copyright:
Empire Online Introduction
The Documents tab allows you to browse through the full range of documents available in the collections, and includes handy filters to narrow your results Document Type (Empire Online only), Library (Empire Online only), Title (CMS Periodicals only), and Issue Date (CMS Periodicals only).
Church Missionary Society Periodicals Documents
Additionally, the Advanced Search is available and allows researchers to build more complex searches:
Empire Online Advanced Search
Empire Online offers an option to view the sources in a chronological format, and the CMS Periodicals offers an option to view the sources on a map format:
CMS Periodicals MapsEmpire Online Chronology
Both databases offer extensive support, search tips and advice under the Help tab.
Please get in touch if you need any more support using the databases, but we hope that they will be of interest to your research!
In the library we love these short guides from OUP who provide a variety of great concise books on lots of different topics.
We’ve recently updated this collection so it includes to most recent publications from OUP published in 2022 and 2023.
This series offers concise introductions to a diverse range of subjects—from artificial intelligence to folk music to medical ethics—in 35,000 words or less.
Each one of these big little books provides intelligent and serious introductions written by experts who combine facts, analysis, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make even the most challenging topics highly readable.
On our catalogue, Library Search you can search by keywords like in the screenshot below so “very short introduction” and browse through or add in Oxford to add in results for that publisher. Re-sort your results to “newest” if you’d like to browse through the latest ones added to our collection.
Or visit the OUP Very Short Introductions website directly and then filter using the subject categories. OUP have arranged the titles under headings such as Medicine and Health, Arts and Humanities, Law, Social Sciences
if you are accessing off campus then once you’re on the OUP site please click “sign in” (on the left hand menu and select Newcastle University from the list to enter your Campus ID and password.)
Oxford University Press also have a podcast you can subscribe to about titles and topics in this collection.
The provider is offering some free online training which can booked directly with them. For sessions related to the subscriptions we have the dates are :
Orbis on the 12th of June at 1.30pm (London time) Book here
FAME on the 13th of June at 10am (London Time) Book here
We have additional help materials on our resource guide if you want to learn more about these databases.
Our Recommend a Book service for students allows you to tell us about the books you need for your studies. If we don’t have the books you need, simply complete the web form and we’ll see if we can buy them. For books we already have in stock, if they are out on loan please make a reservation/hold request using Library Search.
In Semester Three, academic year 2021/2022 we successfully processed 21 requests from 13 students (8 PGR, 1 PGT and 4 UGT) in SAPL totalling just over £1600.
Our Recommend a Book service for students allows you to tell us about the books you need for your studies. If we don’t have the books you need, simply complete the web form and we’ll see if we can buy them. For books we already have in stock, if they are out on loan please make a reservation/hold request using Library Search.
In Semester Three, academic year 2021/2022 we successfully processed 32 requests from 12 students (11 PGR, 1 PGT and 0 UGT) in GPS totalling just over £2300.
We’ve got a wide range of specialist information resources for English literature students. We know it can be rather overwhelming knowing where to start, so this blog post gives you a whistle stop tour of what you can find.
Library Search and your reading lists are great starting points for finding books, journals and other resources for your modules, but we’ve highlighted below some more specialised resources which you’ll want to explore.
Interdisciplinary academic research databases
Interdisciplinary bibliographic databases, such as Scopus or JSTOR are a great starting point after Library Search, as they enable you to discover secondary literature, irrespective of the subject area, and have really helpful features to help you focus your search. This can be useful if your topic covers more than one subject area, or if you’re trying to scope your topic broadly. Content includes journal articles, conference papers, book chapters and reviews.
Specialist English literature research databases
Literature Online (LION) is an indispensable database for researching English literature. It comprises three main sections:
literary criticism: search articles from over 400 journals, together with the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature
primary texts: 350,000 works of poetry, prose and drama from the 8th century to the present
reference: encylopedias, topic overviews and author biographies
LION search screen
You can search all of these information types at once with the All button selected, or focus on a particular section by choosing the appropriate button.
If you haven’t used LION before, or would like a refresher, a good way to get an insight into the content, and different ways to search, is to try out the sample searches in this LION guide (Links to an external site.).
Film and Television Literature Index
If you’re researching a film or television studies topic, including literary adapations, then you may find Film and Television Literature Indexto be useful. It includes articles from academic journals and film magazines, and coverage is focused on film and television theory, writing, production and reviews.
Digitised archives
Romanticism: Life, Literature, Landscape
There is a vast range of digitised literary archives available, and it would be impossible to list every one, but we have picked out some major resources on the English Literature subject guide, in the General literary resources > archives section. These include:
Click on the links above for blog posts giving more information about these fascinating archives.
We also have a fascinating range of historic and contemporary literary archives in our own Special Collections section: please browse the web site by subject to find out more and read here for how to consult items and get further advice.
Literary texts: historic book collections online
Oxford World’s Classics
As well as the many individual literary print and e-books in our collections, we also have access to several major online collections of literary texts from different historical periods, which feature in-depth contextual information, facsimile images of the original texts, and sophisticated search and analytical features.
From Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), we have access to almost every book published in English from the fifteenth to nineteenth century, complemented by other specialist collections, such as Oxford Scholarly Editions Online.
ECCO screenshot
Our blog post gives an overview of five of the major collections. You can find all the individual books from these collections on Library Search, but we recommend searching and browsing the databases themselves (for example, EEBO) to get the best searching and viewing experience.
Audiovisual resources: Box of Broadcasts and Drama Online
Box of Broadcasts (BoB) contains over two million programmes from over 75 television and radio channels. Coverage mostly dates from 2007 to the present day. It’s a great resource for finding literary adaptations on television, film and radio, together with documentaries about writers, and arts review broadcasts. Find out how to get the best out of BoB via our BoB blog post.
Drama Online screenshot
The Library has purchased various collections from the Drama Online database, which comprises the text of over 3,000 plays, from ancient Greek drama to contemporary works, together with contextual works relating to drama theory and practice. We have also recently bought several video collections, featuring films of major theatrical productions from the National Theatre, Globe and Royal Shakespeare Company.
Read more about this exciting platform and the very latest content on our blog post.
English Literature Subject Guide
This posting is just a taster of all the great resources available for your subject area. To access them and find out more, visit your Subject Guide and explore the databases and other subject specific resources which we’ve curated for English literature.
The Library has lots of great collections and resources, so when it comes to finding wider reading for your topic or beginning research for your assignment or dissertation it might all seem a bit overwhelming. Library Search can be a great place to start looking for information but there are many other resources you might want to try. To help you get the best out of our resources we’ve put together this list of some of the most useful online databases and collections for the study of Language and Linguistics.
Let’s dive in!
Scopus
Scopus is a large, interdisciplinary database of peer-reviewed literature, providing an index of articles, book chapters, conference papers and trade publications.
One of the main advantages of using Scopus is that it provides a lot of useful information about the articles it indexes. This includes full reference lists for articles and cited reference searching, so you can navigate forward and backward through the literature to uncover all the information relevant to your research. You can also set up citation alerts, so you can be informed of new, relevant material automatically.
Video guide to expanding your search results in Scopus.
Scopus includes other smart tools that can help you track and visualise the research in your area, including author and affiliation searching, visual analysis of search results, a journal analyser, and author identifier tools. You’ll find tutorials and advice on using these features in the Scopus support centre and on their YouTube Channel.
JSTOR
JSTOR provides access to full-text materials including scholarly journals, books and book chapters in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. It has basic and advanced search options that allow you to search by topic keyword, author, subject area, title or publisher.
Take a look at our Get more out of JSTOR blog post to find tips for advanced searching on this database.
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA)
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts is an excellent resource for those interested in the nature and use of language. The database focuses on academic resources for the study of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, and descriptive, historical, comparative, theoretical and geographical linguistics.
LLBA has the added advantage of including a specialised linguistics thesaurus, which you can use in advanced search to refine and focus your search. The thesaurus provides a searchable list of all the subject terms used in the database and highlights links between broader, narrower and related terms, helping you to select all of the keywords relevant to your topic.
ProQuest provide a helpful and detailed guide to LLBA which includes search tips for basic and advanced search as well as some sample searches you can work through to familiarise yourself with the database.
The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics
The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics is a comprehensive online reference work covering 27 key areas of the field, including Language Learning and Teaching, Bilingual and Multilingual Education, Assessment and Testing, Corpus Linguistics, Conversation Analysis, Discourse and Technology and Language. You’ll also find over 200 entries on the philosophy and history of applied linguistics and biographies of key applied linguists.
You can browse the Encyclopedia by topic or look for keywords using simple or advanced searches.
Accents and Dialects
Accents and Dialects is a searchable database of English accent recordings from the British Library Sound Archive. Recordings include early spoken word snippets from the 1890s onwards, Opie’s collection of children’s songs and games, an evolving English word bank, and a survey of English dialects. Each recording includes a detailed description, and some include additional linguistic descriptions too. Most recordings can be downloaded for academic use.
You can browse the database by project, county, or date. You can also use the search box on the top right of the page to look for specific keywords, including dialects or places.
The British Library have also developed an interactive timeline showing the evolution of the English language from the 11th Century to the present day. This requires Adobe Flash to view.
The Cambridge History of the English Language
The Cambridge History of the English Language is a six-volume work providing an authoritative account of the history of English; from Old English through to modern variations in Britain and overseas. Each volume gives a chronological overview of the data, links to scholarship in the area and considers the impact of current and developing linguistic theory on the interpretation of the data.
You can access volumes individually on Library Search or sign in via institutional login at the link above to browse all volumes together.
Historic Newspapers
The Library provides access to several million digitised pages of historic newspapers, dating from the seventeenth century. We have all UK broadsheet archives online (e.g. The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph) as well as titles which are strong in arts and culture coverage, such as the Times Literary Supplement.
If you want to search across a range of historic new sources, start with Gale Primary Sources, as this gives access to all our British newspaper archives, except The Guardian and The Observer. Gale also has a useful tool called term frequency that allows you to track the history of particular words and phrases.
You’ll find an overview of all our News resources on our Newspaper Guide.
Box of Broadcasts (BoB)
Box of Broadcasts allows you to access TV and radio broadcasts from over 65 channels, including most of the UK’s Freeview network, all BBC TV and radio content from 2007, and several foreign language channels. It’s a great resource for finding documentaries or critical opinions.
You can view archived programmes, create clips and playlists, and see transcripts to help with citation and translation. You can also search other user’s public playlists to see curated lists around topics similar to your own. There are lots of helpful tutorial videos on the BoB website.
Unfortunately, Box of Broadcasts is not available outside the UK.
English Language and Linguistics Subject Guide
This list was just a taster of all the great resources available for your subject area, to access these and to find out more visit the English Language and Linguistics Subject Guide and explore the journals, databases and subject specific resources we’ve curated for students interested in this field of study.
