Lord Byron contemplating the Colosseum in Rome, Arthur Willmore/James Tillett Willmore, ca. 1850
Important Tools/Services
- CLIO is the libraries' primary search interface. It provides access to all of Columbia's books, databases, journals, and articles. Don't use Google!
- Scan & Deliver enables students, faculty and staff to request electronic delivery of articles and book chapters from the general print collections of most Columbia Libraries. 1 chapter per book and 1 journal article per issue (due to copyright restrictions).
- Borrow Direct lets you borrow books directly from libraries at Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Penn, Princeton, UChicago, and Yale if the book you need is unavailable or is not owned by Columbia University. Also works for DVDs now and the loan period has been extended to 16 weeks!
- Interlibrary Loan is the service to use for items that are not available through Borrow Direct, such as journal articles, microfilm, dissertations, etc.
- Access to Other Libraries: Information on reciprocal access and on-site borrowing privileges at a number of other universities, including NYU.
- WorldCat: If you can't find the book/resource you're looking for in CLIO, try WorldCat. It indexes the catalogs from research libraries around the world and will tell you where to find even very obscure materials.
- Subject Specialists: Columbia's librarians specialize in every discipline and field of research at the university. If your work is interdisciplinary let me know and I can connect you to one or more subject specialists.