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The London School of Economics (LSE) Library

The Library of the LSE is a resource for social science researchers and economists. It serves 8,900 students.

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 approximately 9,000 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. Click here
The Library subscribes to a wide-range of electronic databases covering the social sciences and over 40,000 electronic journals. See: www.lse.ac.uk/library/eresources

More on the LSE's collection policy can be found here.

Institutional repositories

LSE has three online institutional repositories. LSE Research Online contains open access research publications produced by LSE staff, including journal articles, book chapters and working papers.
LSE Theses Online holds completed and examined PhD theses from doctoral candidates who have studied at LSE. LSE Learning Resources Online is a dedicated collection of LSE learning resources. It was set up for the DELILA (Developing Educators Learning and Information Literacies for Accreditation) project.

The Library is also an European Documentation Centre and a depository for United Nations documents and United States federal government documents.

Digital Library Projects

LSE Library is currently undertaking a development programme to build the LSE Digital Library, which will increase its capacity to collect, manage, preserve and provide access to digital collections. Over time, the digital library will embody digital collection curation practice across the Library as we continue to serve the needs of social scientists through the digital revolution and beyond.

The Library has been 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 digitisation project 19th Century Pamphlets Online in which LSE was a partner.

LSE led the JISC funded Version Identification Framework Project (VIF), with Erasmus University of Rotterdam as one of the associate partners, to develop a framework for version identification of digital objects. The project developed guidelines and a toolkit for researchers and other stakeholders. See: www.lse.ac.uk/library/vif.

LSE was an associate partner in the DISC-UK Datashare Project which was led by Edina. Datashare aimed to introduce and test a new model of data sharing and archiving to UK research institutions. The final report can be found here .