International Students

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Library Skills

Library tours and inductions

You will be getting a library induction as part of the first week schedule set by your School. Here you will meet your subject librarian, who will show you some of the resources you can expect to find in our libraries. If you miss this induction for any reason, please do not hesitate to contact your subject librarian and arrange a one-to-one session to go over the library basics.

Library Skills

In order to get the most out of your time at UEL, it is important that you use the resources that the library has, from books and journal articles, to DVDs and eBooks. Applying the information you discover in these resources will form part of the skills you perfect at university and can then take into the workplace and your chosen career.

Library and Learning Services staff have developed an online tool to aid you in getting the most from library resources called Info Skills. Here you will learn how to identify, find, evaluate and reference the information contained within our resources in a variety of engaging ways, including demonstrations, quizzes and videos.

For more subject-specific resources, please see the subject page for your particular study area, where your subject librarian has listed useful databases and websites to assist you in completing your assignments.

Some databases we subscribe to allow the user to choose the language they wish to view their results in. For example, EBSCO databases have a language function at the top of the home page if you wish to view the search results in a language other than English.

We also have some special eBooks which are particularly useful to our international students:

'Getting ahead as an international student' by Dave Burnapp (2009)
'Academic writing: a handbook for international students' by Stephen Bailey (2006)

Search for them with Library Search.

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Athens logins

You will hear about Athens logins during the library induction or from your tutors. This is a username and password issued to your UEL email account when you first arrive as a student. It allows you access to our eBook collection and to all of our eJournals and databases from off-campus and abroad. It is very important that you have access to these resources from anywhere in the UK or the world, so please be sure to make a note of your Athens details. If you lose your Athens login or there is a problem logging in, you can contact us to correct this.

For more details about using your Athens login, please see this guide

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Referencing help

As international students you should have been issued with a free copy of Cite Them Right by Richard Pears. This is a style guide to Harvard referencing which most Schools academics' (though not Psychology or Law) use to mark reference lists in assignments.

This is also available as an eBook via UEL Plus, the University's virtual learning space. There are print copies for loan in all our libraries.

If you need help with referencing you can speak to a librarian or your tutor, who will be happy to advise you.

More information on referencing is available on the library website, and in more detail on the Info Skills site.

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