Improving access to library resources

Our teams have been working hard on a review of library resources to ensure that the library continues to meet the needs of education and research across the University for many years to come.

Here we outline our new approach to managing library collections and expand upon resources available within these collections and the content delivery services available for staff and students. 

Resources and subscriptions

All study, teaching and research resources at Essex are managed through Library Search.

We continue to provide digital access to over 120,000 journals and many more packages providing access to millions of resources, including e-books, reports, media, and other scholarly and professional content. 

Our libraries contain over 1 million books and other physical materials, over 80 named special and archive collections, as well as other collections, including the internationally significant ESCALA collection.

Request a Resource

Our Request a Resource service has recently received a significant upgrade.

Library Services have several ways that staff and students can request resources, depending on its usage in teaching, study, or research.

We continue to purchase items for reading lists upon request and create digitisations from our print collections for instant access by students. Staff and students can also request to borrow books from another University of Essex campus.

Where a resource is required urgently, we offer an inter-library loan service. It is this service we have improved by implementing the 'RapidILL' system.

The enhanced inter-library loans service enables the faster circulation of online articles and book chapters. This enhancement to our existing Request a Resource service is already in place and will speed up the digital delivery of content to students and staff, sourced from libraries across the world.

Annual resource review

Library Services are moving towards an annual review of learning, teaching and research resources, which looks at the entire collection and includes:

• Reviewing the cost-effectiveness of online subscriptions to eBooks, journals and databases
• Working with departments to identify key resources for their students, researchers and staff
• Introducing the rapid inter-library loan service mentioned above

We are committed to building a responsive collection which fully reflects the academic disciplines at Essex and empowers our students, researchers, and academic staff to discover, critically engage with, and create cutting-edge knowledge and research.

We are also committed to supporting the learning and research communities at Essex and our teams are being trained on new systems and procedures, routes to access content, and the availability of suitable alternatives to ensure that all students, researchers, and academic staff are supported through any changes to service.

Buying books

Moving to an annual review of library resources does not mean that we have stopped buying books – far from it! Book purchasing will always continue, and we still purchase new books, eBooks, and journals to service both our print and digital collections. 

For 2024-25 we are committed to spending £3.2 million on information resources and we will continue to acquire materials required for teaching and learning at Essex.

In addition to our inter-library loan service, Essex researchers can also make purchase suggestions where we will buy recommended titles to help develop and diversify our collections.

Open Access resources

We are a passionate advocate of Open Access publishing and Open Access resources and for 2024-25 we have committed to spend £450,000 on open access publishing for Essex authors.

Open Access, and more broadly Open Research, aims to democratise the publication of scholarship and make it freely available in online environments, therefore making it openly accessible to anyone.

What Open Access means for Essex researchers is that they can access research, journals, repositories and books through a variety of Open Access resource channels to support their research and studies.

Our Research Support team will even support you to publish your research Open Access via our Open Access Fund.

Find out more about the resources available through our Library Services, or email libline@essex.ac.uk for information on specific resource access.