The Library’s Special Collections & Galleries department holds over 200,000 rare books and thousands of archive collections and manuscripts, many of which are unique to Leeds. Material covers a vast range of subjects, and is often of outstanding national and international interest. Designated collections include English Literature, the Leeds Russian Archive, Liddle (First and Second World Wars), Cookery and the Gypsy Traveller and Roma collection. The department also manages the University art collection, the International Textile Collection, and the University’s own archive. Find out more, and search for material that might interest you, on our Special Collections website.

The Library provides access to a vast amount of physical and digital resources such as databases, journals and books.

Use Library Search to find books, journals and other materials on your topic, and to access full texts online with your University of Leeds login.

Your subject page will help you find out about the information sources available in your research discipline.

You can borrow up to 50 items. Items automatically renew, unless another user requests them.

You can use the document supply service to obtain books, journals, conference papers, reports and theses which are not available at the Library. Depending on the type of document you request, you will receive either a photocopy of the required pages or a loan of the whole work.

If you would like to suggest an item that you think the Library should purchase you can fill in our purchase suggestion form.

There are two schemes you can use so you can visit other libraries:​

• SCONUL Access
• White Rose Reciprocal Access Scheme for Sheffield and York universities

Remember that you can use other public or national libraries, as well as university libraries. Find more information on the Library website.

The Library’s Digitisation Service provide electronic copies of material held at Leeds. With a wide range of first-rate digitisation equipment, the Service are able to create high-quality reproductions of images, audio and text documents for publication and research purposes. Lower resolution copies can be produced on-demand to support your research needs. For more information about our copying services, see our webpages.

The Library Research Services Team provide a literature searching service which typically supports funded researchers with strategically aligned research projects.

Our team of information specialists can support researchers with evidence syntheses including:

• horizon scanning of academic and grey literature to identify new and emerging areas of research
• scoping searches and reviews to identify research gaps and opportunities
• rapid reviews to provide literature summaries on research questions
• systematic reviews to appraise and synthesise evidence relating to a research question.

Our service is provided subject to capacity, and a charge may apply. We do not conduct literature searches that form part of assessed academic work. Please email us to discuss your needs.

The Library Research Support Advisors run literature searching workshops to help you with your research. We offer training sessions for postgraduate researchers and research staff. More information on the literature searching training we offer, and details of how to book, can be found on our website.

Responsible research metrics is the appropriate and responsible use of quantitative indicators in the assessment of research performance. The University is committed to the responsible use of research metrics and has signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). DORA recognises the need to improve the ways in which researchers and the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated. University of Leeds statement in support of responsible research metrics in the assessment of research is available on the Research and Innovation Service website.

For more information on using metrics responsibly visit our research metrics webpages.

Open access publishing makes peer-reviewed scholarly works and other research outputs like pre prints and datasets available online, free for anyone to find and read. The potential readership of open access research is far greater than where the full-text is restricted.

There are personal and professional benefits to making your research open access, but there are also some important policies that require it. Major research funders like UKRI require that research outputs produced as part of their funded projects are made open access as soon as they are published. Find out more about the REF policy, the institutional publication policy and the requirements around depositing PhD theses.

Open data can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose. It is made available under an open license like Creative Commons. One of the challenges of making data openly available is to make it easily discoverable by others, so that it can be accessed, analysed and integrated into research, tasks and projects. FAIR data principles act as guidelines to enhance the reusability of your data.

FAIR stands for: findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. To be fully open, data must also be FAIR. However, data can be FAIR without being open: restricted-access data could be FAIR if the descriptive metadata is openly accessible. For more information on FAIR data principles, visit our open and fair data pages.

A data management plan helps you to structure your approach to data and to record important information and decisions as you go along. All research projects at University of Leeds should have a regularly updated data management plan.

Some research funders require a data management plan as part of your grant application to ensure appropriate resources are in place to manage your data, including equipment, storage and staffing.

A data management plan template is available from the Library but you can structure your plan in a way that is most useful to your project. Further information about data management plans is available on the Library website.

Further information about data management plans is available on the Library website.

Sharing data can increase your impact as a researcher and contribute to research transparency and reproducibility. You may also be meeting your funder’s or a journal’s data sharing expectations.

The Library can advise on data deposit in online data services, such as the Research Data Leeds repository hosted in the Library.

Not all data is suitable for sharing – for example, if you are handling sensitive data. Consider ethical and legal aspects of data in your data management plan and cover data sharing in any ethics applications.

The Library has useful information on safe handling of sensitive data.