Research services

Resources | Collections | Research tools | Scholarly communications | In the Library

Resources

Liaison Librarians

Liaison Librarians provide a number of services to support teaching, learning and research.  They collaborate with faculty to develop services and collections that meet the needs of their students and departments. Liaison Librarians assess information needs and create specialized materials and products, such as online information resource guides, awareness/alerting services, and much more.

Librarians welcome opportunities to collaborate on faculty research teams and to participate in departmental meetings or committees where issues related to the Library or information needs are discussed.

Contact your Liaison Librarian to:

  • Integrate information technology and information literacy into your curriculum.
  • Book individual or classroom instruction in information retrieval and research skills.
  • Arrange library orientation for new faculty members.
  • Receive assistance to design effective library assignments.
  • Incorporate links to course-specific readings and other class material.
  • Book a consultation on your research topic.
  • Discuss how a librarian can support your grant application.
  • Find out how to best disseminate the results of your research.
  • Ask copyright questions.
  • Receive help with bibliographic verification.
  • Suggest library material for purchase.
  • Receive help developing well structured knowledge syntheses.

Locate your Liaison Librarian by academic discipline.

Subject guides

Liaison librarians have created many subject guides containing recommendations of background sources, key databases and scholarly websites for your students. Contact us if you have other sources or sites to recommend.

Consultations

Liaison Librarians can help track resources on particular topics, locate difficult to find information, and can assist with sources required for the preparation of research.

Assistance

You can email, chat online or drop by and visit our knowledgeable staff at any branch library. Don’t hesitate to get in touch!


Collections

McGill Library has the largest collection in Quebec and is one of Canada’s most important academic libraries with access to 6 million monographs and 80,000 online journals and databases collected to support all disciplines represented at McGill.

Library catalogue

The Library provides access to a wide range of primary and secondary resources. Its extensive holdings of electronic and print collections are available in most disciplinary areas and can be found by searching the WorldCat Discovery Catalogue.

Reference materials

Bookmark the Quick Reference page for links to commonly used reference material such as dictionaries, directories, guidebooks, and much more.

E-books

When you search for books in the WorldCat Discovery catalogue, the electronic versions appear in the search results on the left hand side of the screen just below the Books header.

E-journals

If you are looking for a specific journal, you can use WorldCat Discovery to search for the journal by title. You may use also the Library’s E-journal title search or A-Z journal list.

Databases

If you are looking for a specialized database, you can use WorldCat Discovery to search for that database by name or use the Library’s Databases A-Z list.

Off-campus access to resources is handled two ways, EZProxy will prompt you for a McGill username and password, if you connect to the resource from any Library webpage. Configuring the VPN (virtual private network) client and running a VPN session allows you to connect to any Library resource from any link.

Specialist resources

Rare books & Archives

The Rare Books and Special Collections Library (RBSC) has significant holdings in the humanities and social sciences and in particular art and architecture, Canadiana, history, literature, the history of ideas (philosophy and religion), travel and exploration, the history of the book as well as the rare scientific book collections of the Blackader-Lauterman, the Blacker-Wood, Islamic Studies and Macdonald Campus libraries. RBSC also provides services for McGill University Archives from their 4th floor location in the McLennan Library building. The Library also has rare book and special collections in the Marvin Duchow Music Library, the Nahum Gelber Law Library and the Osler Library of the History of Medicine.

Explore the Library’s many digital collections, texts, and virtual exhibitions.

Use our digitization services for your research needs.

The Library’s web pages also contain links to Government information, Maps & geospatial data and Audio & video streaming resources.

The Library’s subscription to specialized databases such as Films on Demand, Theatre in Video, ARTstor, Naxos Music Library, medici.tv, Counseling and Therapy in Video and Anatomy.TV allow you to view audio and visual material in your office, in class or anywhere else.

Search the Library’s Audio Visual sub-catalogue to locate DVDs, films, recorded music, recorded sound, and video recordings.

Theses & dissertations

Hathi Trust

McGill Library is a member of HathiTrust, a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.

CRL

McGill Library is a member of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL). CRL’s five million newspapers, journals, books, pamphlets, dissertations, archives, and government publications from all world regions: Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe are available on loan in microformats and increasingly as digital materials.

Interlibrary loans (ILL) service

The Library’s Interlibrary loan service (Colombo) will locate materials not owned by McGill but held by other libraries in North America. McGill graduate students and faculty members are entitled to borrow materials on a long-term basis from the CRL and all requests are submitted in Colombo.

Purchase requests

The McGill Library will make every effort to acquire any additional material required to support teaching and learning. Please let your liaison librarian know about any gaps or complete the Suggest a purchase form.


Research tools

Mobile apps

The Mobile apps guide keeps track of the mobile apps the McGill library subscribes to, selected by liaison librarians.

Software

McGill's campus software program includes a wide range of software applications for use by the campus community. Consult the Licensed software products and eligible users page to download popular software programs such as Trend Micro antivirus software, the citation management software EndNote or Refworks, and MATLAB, an interactive environment for data visualization and analysis program.

Alerts / journal table of contents services

Journals TOC, a free collection of scholarly journals Tables of Contents, alerts you when new content is published in the group of journals you select to follow. Alternatively, register for table of contents alerts from the individual journal homepage, or the journal publisher page. Also, most academic databases enable you to save searches and receive updated results, including Google Scholar.

Bibliography citation software

Citation management software such as EndNote or RefWorks can make managing your research easier by allowing you to create your own electronic library of references, assist in formatting and intext citations as your prepare publications.

Grant databases

Grant Connect is a bilingual database with detailed, searchable information on thousands of major funders.

Links to other funding opportunities


Scholarly communications

Essential Services for Researchers

The Library’s Scholarly Communications team and your Liaison Librarian can provide assistance on the following topics:

Research impact and metrics

Librarians can help you and your research team assess publication venues for impact and assist in avoiding predatory publication outlets. Librarians can also help your develop your researcher profile and enrich your tenure portfolio by helping you find your h-index, impact factor, citation counts, alternative metrics and more.

Author Support

Often publishers create barriers for authors who want to reuse their work, or allow others to use it.. Librarians can review your contract agreements and provide support and expertise in negotiating your rights. This is particularly important for authors who need to with funding requirements for open access.  

Research Integrity

Complying with funder Open Access policies

Librarians will provide support for complying with the new Tri-Agency (SSHRC, NSERC, CIHR) Policy on Open Access publications. We can assist in depositing your work in McGill Library’s institutional repository eScholarship as a means to comply with this new policy. The repository exists in an online, open-access environment, making it easy for researchers all over the world to find and access the your research output.

Data management planning and sharing

Canada’s three federal research granting agencies— CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC—have adopted the Tri-Agency Statement of Principles on Digital Data Management. Librarians are available to support researchers establishing and implementing data management practices that are consistent with ethical, legal, and commercial obligations, as well as Tri-Agency requirements. Librarians can also advise on the best repositories or platforms that securely preserve, curate and provide continued access to research data.

Copyright permissions and best practices

For researchers wishing to incorporate third-party content, such as figures, photographs into their research outputs, the Library can advise on copyright best practices, including how and when permissions should be sought. For more information, researchers can contact their Liaison Librarian or copyright.library [at] mcgill.ca or consult https://www.mcgill.ca/copyright.

 


In the Library

Workshops

Information skills workshops

Information skills workshops for students help build and refine research skills, as well as provide training in software programs used to organize references and format document bibliographies.

MyResearch graduate seminar series

MyResearch is a suite of workshops tailored to graduate and postdoctoral students to provide essential research skills, and tools to support their research and publications.

Collaborative workspaces

Group study & online room booking

The Library provides group study areas in many branch libraries which can be booked online. For example, the Cyberthèque in the Humanities and Social Sciences Library provides glass-encased group study pods, as well as booth-like banquettes which can be utilized for group work.

Graduate spaces

Graduate students who are currently writing theses and do not have office space may book small rooms or desks in some libraries. Facilities for graduate students are available in the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Macdonald Campus Library, Nahum Gelber Law Library, Marvin Duchow Music Library and Schulich Library.

Graduate students may access the Nahum Gelber Law Library and Schulich Library of Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, and Engineering when the libraries are closed. Access is usually restricted to graduate students and staff in the departments served by the individual branch library. Contact your branch library for more information.

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