Library Services for Studying Online: Requesting books and articles

If you need a book or article that the library doesn't already have, you can request it via Inter-Library Loans. This means we will request a copy from another library that holds it. You can find out how to do this here.

Google Books is a free service from Google that has made many books available in digital form. For copyright reasons, usually the full text of the book is not available. However you can usually read short extracts (up to 10% of the total) which may give you enough information to start with.

Google Scholar is a free search engine that searches only scholarly literature (e.g. journal articles, conference papers and patents). You could use Google Scholar in combination with Summon to find a wide range of resources on your topic.

Please be aware of the following when searching Google Scholar:

• Unlike Summon, which only searches high-quality sources paid for by the University, Google Scholar searches a wide range of sources of varying quality. Use your critical judgment before relying on information found via Google Scholar.
• Some of the content in Google Scholar may be behind paywalls. You can sometimes access these by using the "Library Links" setting in Google Scholar (see below), copy&pasting the article title into Summon to see if we have access to it, or using the free UnPaywall plugin (see box to the right).

In Google Scholar, you can set which University you are from and it will automatically link to any papers that are available via our paid-for subscriptions.

To start, click the three horizontal lines at the top left to open the menu, then select "Settings".

Then, click "Library Links" from the left hand menu. In the search bar, search "Huddersfield" and hit enter. Tick the box that says "University of Huddersfield - Full-Text @ Huddersfield", and click "Save" at the bottom of the screen.

Google Scholar will now remember that you are a Huddersfield student, and provide links to full-text content where we have paid for it.

If a book you need is not available on Summon as an ebook, please email library@hud.ac.uk with details and we will help you find alternative sources you can use.

If the book is on a reading list for one of your modules, please let your lecturer know that you are unable to access it, and ask them to contact the library to discuss options for making alternative resources available.

LibKey Nomad is a browser extension for Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave and Vivaldi that provides single click access to library content from publisher websites, PubMed, Wikipedia and more.

To get started:

1. Go to: www.LibKeyNomad.com

2. Click on the appropriate browser icon

3. Search for and select 'University of Huddersfield' from the dropdown menu

4. Look for the 'Nomad' button when browsing publisher websites

Adding the free Unpaywall extension to your internet browser can help you to easily identify Open Access (freely available) research articles when you're searching outside of Summon.

More info here: unpaywall.org/

[Please note this is an external service, not provided by the University of Huddersfield]