As Libraries Week draws to a close, we wanted to remind you that we’re more than just a Building. As well as the Academic Support and Liaison Librarians and our other Services and Resources staff, the Library provides you with access to a range of resources for your study and research. Many of these resources are available online.

Last year we spent £1.6 million on books, journals and databases – here’s three ways you can easily access them, and maybe discover something new:

Discovery 

As well as searching for physical books and journals, our search tool Discovery searches over 90 databases to provide direct access to thousands of articles. It can be accessed from the Find Resources page or directly at https://discovery.hw.ac.uk

Our Find Resources pagealso has a number of guides to help you use Discovery to find what you need, whether you’re looking for a specific book or article, or searching on a particular topic.

Subject Guides

Our Academic Support and Liaison Librarians have constructed guides on every subject to help you find the most relevant resources. The Subject Guides also have a lot of other information on Literature Search, Citing and Referencing, and more. They can found from the IS Guides web page.

A-Z Database List

The A-Z Database list, available from the top of Discovery, is a list of all the resources we have. We always recommend searching individual databases as well as Discovery, especially as over 120 of our databases are not included in Discovery. You can filter the list of resources by subject as well as whether or not they are included in Discovery.

As well as academic databases, this list also includes Cite Them Right, an online guide to Harvard Referencing, and Skills 4 Study Campus, the online course in study skills based on The Study Skills Handbook by Stella Cottrell.

And finally…

Information Services also facilitates access to a range of other software for you, which you can get for free as a Heriot-Watt student. More information can be found on the Software page.

EndNote is a reference management program that allows you to store all of your references in one place and generate lists of formated references, or directly insert citations into your Microsoft Word document. Whilst EndNote is desktop based a

nd only available on Information Services managed PCs, there is a web based version called EndNote Online, which can be accessed from anywhere. For more information, see our Software Guides and Tutorials page.

Help and Support

There are lots of ways you can get help and support using our resources. You can contact the Academic Support and Liaison Librarians at LibHelp@hw.ac.uk, check out the IS Guides page or attend a Power Hour. Slides and handouts from our Power Hours are also available on Vision under the ‘My Organisations’ section.