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Profile of the London School of Economics (LSE) Library

Brief history
The LSE Library (British Library of Political and Economic Science) was founded in 1896 by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, founders of the LSE. It is a Library for LSE and a resource for social science researchers. It serves 8,600 students. The Library moved to its current location - the Lionel Robbins Building in 1978. This building was redeveloped by the architects Foster and Partners in 2001.

Collections
The Library holds over 4 million books and journals. It collects comprehensively in economics and other core social sciences and contains material in the major European languages. Special collections include government publications, the publications of intergovernmental organisations, historical pamphlets, and statistics. There is a substantial archive collection.
Archives include those of the Fabian Society, the Liberal Party, papers of individual politicians and the Hall Carpenter Archives.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/archive/Default.htm The Library subscribes to a wide-range of electronic databases covering the social sciences and over 15,000 electronic journals. http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/elelib.htm

More on the LSE's collection policy

Institutional repositories
The Library is a depository for European Union documents, United Nations documents and United States federal government documents.

LSE has an online institutional repository, LSE Research Online, which contains open access articles and other research papers by LSE academics. LSE Research Online has been created as part of the SHERPA-LEAP University of London consortium, led by UCL.

Digital Library Projects
The International Bibliography of the Social Sciences available online is published by the Library. http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/IBSS/. The Library is involved in a number of collaborative projects and partnerships. These include several digitisation projects, for example:
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has funded a selective digitisation project for some of the Library's historical pamphlets on social policy and transport.

The JISC has provided funding for digital repositories projects and LSE is participating in three of these:
LSE is leading the VERSIONS Project, with Nereus as associate partners, to address the issues and uncertainties regarding versions of academic papers online. The project will develop guidelines and a toolkit for researchers and other stakeholders.

LSE is a partner in the STORE Project which is being led by Edinburgh University. STORE will address the area of interactions between output repositories of research publications and source repositories of primary research data.

LSE is also a partner in the MIDESS Project, led by University of Leeds, which will explore the management of digitised content in an institutional and cross-institutional context through the development of a digital repository infrastructure.

Contact Persons

For information regarding resource questions,

website

For questions regarding Nereus and LSE's involvement, please contact:

j.sykes@lse.ac.uk

The LSE Library Website can be found at
http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/