While we strive to meet your every need while you study with us, whether you have a passion for quality fiction or you are living or working at a distance, joining other libraries might be just the thing to get you what you need.
Public libraries galore
You can join Portsmouth public libraries wherever you come from as one of our students, and if you are living outside of the city, you can join the local public library where you are living while at university as well. Public libraries are often surprisingly well-stocked and useful. They sometimes hold books that appear on reading lists, local history collections not found elsewhere, and other useful gems. There are also the odd occasions when a book you might not think is useful, such as a children’s book of insects, appears on your reading list for an introductory ecology field course. This actually happened to me when I was at university – I think the public library underestimated just how detailed this book was when they assigned it to the children’s collection.
Public libraries supply huge collections of fiction, ebooks, electronic magazines, audiobooks and more that frequently go overlooked and their online collections are extensive and valuable.
Joining Portsmouth public library is easy – just take your student card to any branch and sign up. You can find out more about Portsmouth Libraries on their website.
Local university libraries (for those who live elsewhere)
Many university libraries open their doors to visiting students from other institutions for much of the academic year. You can almost always sign in as a visitor at the reception desk if you present photographic identification (such as your student card). If you want to be able to borrow their printed books or obtain a library card that lets you in and out at will, check out the SCONUL Access scheme. This allows you to obtain a limited membership of other named libraries nearer to where you live. You have to apply in advance, it can take a few weeks to arrange, but if you are a researcher or doing a postgraduate dissertation over a few months, it can sometimes make a whole heap of difference. If you have friends who want to visit our library, they are very welcome to do so and if they are students elsewhere, they can apply for SCONUL membership here and get their own University of Portsmouth Library card.
If you are a student or member of staff at another university who would like to apply for SCONUL membership at our library, details of how to apply are available on our website.
National libraries
The British Library does more than satisfy many of our interlibrary loan requests. You can apply for a reader pass and request books be delivered from their vaults to the St Pancras reading room in North London, a stone’s throw from King’s Cross/St Pancras railway and underground tube stations. As a national copyright deposit library, a copy of everything published in the UK must be sent to the British Library and made available for reference purposes. In recent times, this typically means the British Library are sent an ebook copy that may be consulted only within the London reading rooms but older books are available in print. You can print sections of electronic resources within copyright licence limits but this tends to be expensive. Making notes is, of course, free. Just remember to bring a notepad and pencils in a transparent bag; pens and ink of any kind are forbidden in any of the reading rooms since a student annotated thousands of pounds worth of books with a red pen some years ago. You can secure anything else you brought with you in a locker. Laptops/tablets/phones are still allowed.
While you might be able to use the national libraries of Wales and Scotland, the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge Library, these libraries keep their collections closely guarded and rarely let anyone in without them first demonstrating they have exhausted all the alternatives or, in the case of the universities, being alumni of that institution. The British Library is far more welcoming to anyone with a verified research purpose needing access to their collections.
Using the British Library reading rooms
Register online and then turn up with your student card to collect your reader pass in person. Remember that you can always request books, journal issues, and scans of book chapters and journal articles by interlibrary loan and have them delivered to the University of Portsmouth Library or emailed securely to you, usually arriving in less than two weeks.