Profile of the Social Science Library, Oxford University Library Services
Brief history
Oxford University's Social Science Library was opened in September 2004 as a new library supporting teaching and research in the Centre for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences and for the Social Science Division generally. The Library is part of Oxford University Library Services (OULS), an integrated library system that includes the Central Bodleian Library, the Bodleian Law Library, libraries for Education, Business Studies, Refugee Studies and specialist libraries for area studies including Africa, Commonwealth countries, the US, Japan, India and China. OULS has an estimated 11 million items in its collections with holdings increasing by 350,000 items a year. The Bodleian Library, which celebrated its 400 year anniversary in 2002, has alone an estimated 7 million items on its shelves.
Collections
The Social Science Library holds more than 170,000 volumes and consists of 6 integrated departmental library collections (Socio-Legal Studies, Criminology, PIRS (Politics, International Relations and Sociology), SPSW (Social Policy and Social Work), Development Studies, and Economics) along with selected social science material from the Bodleian Library. The collection includes extensive holdings of international and country financial and social statistics from the 1940s onwards and Oxford's largest collection of research monographs in economics. Collections in social policy and social work date back to 1914 and collections in politics, international relations and sociology to the 1920s. Archive collections, including the personal papers and correspondences of economists such as Nassau William Senior, are held in the Bodleian.
More on the Social Science Library collections.
More on Bodleian Special Collections and Western Manuscripts
Electronic resources are provided centrally by OULS to the whole of the University. These include almost 10,000 electronic journals and over 400 databases across all major subject areas.
More on Oxford's electronic resources
Institutional Repositories
The Bodleian Library is a legal deposit library, which entitles it to claim any work of academic interest published or heavily distributed in the UK. The Official Papers Section of the Library is also a depository for UN and ILO publications. The Bodleian Law Library houses a European Documentation Centre.
Oxford also has an online institutional repository, Oxford Eprints, which has been developed as part of the SHERPA project, a nation wide project investigating institutional e-print repositories.
Digital Library Projects
The Oxford Digital Library specialises in digital image capture, document storage and digital innovation projects. It is currently in its third round of projects with notable achievements including the Early English Books Online partnership with Michigan University. Oxford has also recently signed an agreement with Google to allow digital scanning of the Bodleian collections for inclusion in the Google Print service.
Contact Persons
For information regarding resource questions, please contact:
Mark Janes
Social Sciences Subject Consultant
Tel.: +44 - 1865 - 285936
Fax: +44 - 1865 - 271072
E-Mail: mark.janes@ouls.ox.ac.uk
For questions regarding Nereus and Oxford's involvement, please contact:
The Library Website can be found under
http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk
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