Finding Books and Printed Material

Locating books

The Library Catalogue| contains records of most printed and electronic material available from the Library. The default search is a keyword search, which means you can search for anything from a topic to a title or an author. 

• Try starting with broad terms then using the narrowing options on the left
• Advanced search options are available
• There are video guides to help

Every book has a classmark, made up of letters and numbers. Here are some examples of classmarks for particular subjects in the Library: 

Subject	Classmark
Mathematical analysis	QA300
Mathematical economics	HB135
Statistical methods	HA29
Graph theory	QA166
Probabilities	QA273
Mathematical statistics	QA276
Operational research	T56.7

• Main Collection QA and T material are located on the 1st floor; HA and HB are on the 2nd floor.  For locations of other classmarks please use the Library floor plans.

Reading lists:

• There is a separate Course Collection for key texts (ie: essential readings on reading lists) on the Ground floor, accessible by turnstile for LSE staff and students only.
• Background readings on reading lists have one copy per title located in the Main Collection. You can look for reading lists by clicking on the 'Reading Lists' link at the top of the Library Catalogue and then selecting 'Course books list'.

Finding books not held at LSE: 

• Use COPAC to find books located in the major UK university research libraries, including many in London. 
• Use InforM25 to find books located in the libraries of universities in the London area. 
• Use the Inter-Library Lending system for books that you cannot easily get to yourself. (Use the 'Requests and inter-lending' button on the Library Catalogue to request items).

Finding books wherever they are located:

• Use WorldCat to find virtually all the books published on your topic. 
• Google books is also a very useful source of information, and often has parts of books available to read online.

Ebooks

• The Library also has access to a large number of Ebooks, including thousands of Mathematics and Statistics titles from Springer. All ebooks can be found on the Library Catalogue.

Locating quick reference materials

• The Reference Collection on the first floor contains dictionaries, directories, encyclopaedias etc. For Mathematics, look for classmarks beginning QA, HB. E.g.:

Reference title	Classmark
Penguin dictionary of mathematics	QA37.2 P39
Encyclopaedic dictionary of mathematics	QA5 E51
Statistical tables and formulae	QA276.25 K71

Archives

• See the LSE Archives pages to see what is available here and nationally / internationally.

Newspapers

• Nexis has full-text newspapers going back to 1981. However, it does not have images, statistics, graphs, charts, advertisements. To see these, you will have to use the microfilm versions or go to the BL Newspaper Library (see below).
• The British Library Newspaper Library at Colindale has back-runs of London, British provincial and some overseas newspapers. 
• For more information see our Newspapers page.

Official (ie: government / inter-governmental) Publications

Much information is held within governmental publications. Reports of working parties, committees, commissions and departments may all hold such information. Also, parliamentary (or assembly) papers are valuable sources - as are responses by members of parliaments to questions.