OISE is home to the Ontario Historical Education Collection (OHEC), which includes old curriculum documents, primarily from the Ontario Ministry of Education, as well as textbooks, photographs and other archival material. Access to the collection is by appointment only, and items cannot leave the library. To book an appointment, please contact oise.library@utoronto.ca
If Toronto is not accessible to you, request photocopies through your home institution's Interlibrary Loan services.
If your instructor has made your course readings available through the Library Reading List module on your Quercus course page, follow these steps:
Still having trouble finding or accessing your online course readings? Visit this help page for more information or to fill out a form to report the issue.
You can add funds (TBucks) to your TCard online 24/7 at: https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/tcardplus/.
Newly issued TCards will be enabled in the TCard+ system by 8 am the following day, at which time funds may be loaded online or at a Guest Card & Cash Loading station at Robarts Library or the Gerstein Science Information Centre. In the interim, library staff, upon verification that the TCard was issued that day, will print or photocopy documents for users at no cost. Please visit the print station on the first floor of Robarts Library for assistance.
Complete the online application form or stop by the Carrel Office and someone can assist you in completing the form.
New applications are accepted all year round, and carrels and lockers may be allocated, or names added to the waiting list, at any time. However, all unsuccessful applications for a given academic year are cleared by April 30th, and only those applications submitted from May 1st onward are considered for the subsequent year’s assignments. So, all those applicants who did not obtain a carrel by April 30th but still desire a carrel for the subsequent academic year must submit a new application as of May 1st.
All current carrel occupants must submit an application between May 1st and August 30th in order to renew their occupancy for the subsequent academic year.
Most carrel assignments and renewals are completed during the early portion of the fall session.
Eligible Physical and Life Sciences graduate students can complete the online application form. Any application received later than the end of August will be treated as a late application.
Eligible Faculty of Theology Advanced Degree students can complete the application form and submit it to the Student Services Officer (Rm 307 Muzzo Alumni Hall) by the second Friday of September.
Maintaining your academic integrity is crucial for success at the University of Toronto. The library and other campus bodies are here to help you:
If you've placed a request for intercampus delivery, you can track your request using our RACER service. To learn more about RACER, click here: http://onesearch.library.utoronto.ca/ill?source=quicklinks.
Once the item has been sent from the owning library, it will be checked out to you. To see if this has been done, you can check your library account here: https://toroprod.library.utoronto.ca/uhtbin/cgisirsi/?ps=zGJSHljRDO/ROBARTS/0/1/488/X/BLASTOFF
Please note: direct borrowers do not have access to RACER.
Once you have located the books that you want to check out, take the elevator down to the first floor and have your TCard ready.
You can either use the self serve machines just outside the elevators...
...or visit the loans desk by the main entrance.
Remember, to avoid late fines, you should return items to the library that you borrowed them from.
Searching for scholarly sources is different from searching through Google. It's not efficient to type in full sentences, so you'll need to distil yout essay question, topic, or thesis into keywords.
How do campaign promises sway voters?
Avoid searching with adjectives, adverbs, articles, pronouns, qualifiers, punctuation, and (most of the time) verbs. Basically, the smaller words in a sentence.
How docampaign promisesswayvoters?
Google your concepts to come up with synonyms. Keep a running list of possible keywords. As you start to find scholarly sources, make a note of any new relevant keywords you can add to your search.
- Campaign promises
- party platforms
- Voters
- electorate
- public
Concept maps can help you visualize the different aspects of your topic and come up with keywords you might not have thought of originally. Not all of the words in your map will be good keywords like in the map below where "effects" and "causes" as listed, but they'll help advance your thinking.
If you have more than one concept, you'll have to use separate rows of an advanced search form for each concept.
You can also use parenthesis to create a keyword search string.
(Campaign promises OR party platforms) AND (voters OR electorate OR public)
Quotation marks ensure that any keywords that are more than one word will be treated as a unit instead of separate words. Truncation ensures that you get several versions of the root word.
You can also type it in a single search box if you use parenthesis.
("campaign promises" OR "party platform") AND (vot* OR elector* OR public)
It might take a few tries to get the right mix of keywords and ways of combining them. The library is here to help you figure it out. Don't hesitate to ask for advice.
--Updated February 28, 2022
To create an account in Covidence, a current utoronto email address is required (e.g. @mail.utoronto.ca or @utoronto.ca).
UTORid Management can tell you what your utoronto.ca email address is if you aren't sure.
If you see "Borrow this E-Book" above the cover image of a Scholars Portal Books book, you must follow this process to download it onto a personal computer or device. It will not work on a public computer.
Your book will now open in Adobe Digital Editions. After 72 hours, it will be returned automatically.
Students, staff and faculty can download 3 different mobile apps:
NOTE: The password changes quarterly and must be updated so if you are not on campus to be able to access the Micromedex webpage, you will lose mobile access.
To find more information:
You can improve the quantity and quality of publicly accessible knowledge by editing Wikipedia. These three slide decks cover the basics of Wikipedia and editing.
What is Wikipedia? How does editing work? Do I need an account? Here’s what you need to know before you edit Wikipedia.
Here are some easy ways to improve existing Wikipedia pages:
Here’s an overview of how to create a new Wikipedia page:
There are multiple ways to find a book by its title.
Type the title of the book in double quotation marks into the LibrarySearch search box on the UTL homepage.
Use the following settings:
For more information on using all the many features and functions of LibrarySearch, have a look at this guide on using the new system.
You can enter the journal title in double quotes into the LibrarySearch search box on the U of T Libraries homepage.
A more direct way is to use the journal search function available from the LibrarySearch interface.
You can also find journals by searching as you would for books, that is, by choosing to search the CATALOGUE, or EVERYTHING.
For more information on using all the many features and functions of LibrarySearch, have a look at this guide on using the new system.
To find an article by its title, type the title in double quotes into the search box on the UTL homepage. This will search for the title as a phrase.You can also go straight to LibrarySearch and type the article title in double quotation marks. Make sure to select ARTICLES and click on the magnifying glass icon to search.
See also: Find articles & books by DOI
The individual article record contains many features and functions as shown below. Click on the ellipsis (the three dots ... to the upper right) to bring them up.
Other helpful features in the article record:
For more information on using all the many features and functions of LibrarySearch, have a look at this guide on using the new system.
Search for your title or topic in the LibrarySearch search box, leaving it set to EVERYTHING.
Click ONLINE in the SHOW ONLY filter, then click BOOKS in the FORMAT filter.
You can select more than one filter at once. Then click on APPLY FILTERS.
From the resulting list, you can see e-books that mention this breed of dogs.
Three good ways to find books by author are:
1) Type author name directly into LibrarySearch search box on the UTL homepage
2) Use the ADVANCED SEARCH mode
3) Use the BROWSE feature.
For more information on using all the many features and functions of LibrarySearch, have a look at this guide on using the new system.
You can search for newspapers by article title, newspaper title, or by topic.
Your results will now be limited to newspapers.
For more information on using all the many features and functions of LibrarySearch, have a look at this guide on using the new system.
For further help with searching newspapers, check out our Newspapers Guide.
Robarts Library
Carrels are assigned to new applicants as soon as possible in September. You will be contacted by the Carrel Office, via email, to come in and claim the carrel. You may also visit the Carrel Office, after mid-September, to inquire about your position on the waiting list, which is generated by lottery.
Carrels are assigned to new applicants as soon as possible in September. You will be contacted either by phone or email to come in and claim the carrel/locker. You may inquire about your position on the waiting list (to Catherine Duff) if you do not receive a carrel assignment after September 15th.
Generally, the more times an article has been cited, the most important it is in the literature.
Many databases--including Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar--tell you how many times an article has been cited by other articles in the database. You'll usually find this information in either the search results screen or in the detailed view of the article (examples below)
Not all databases have this feature. Also, this feature only tells you how many times the article has been cited within the database you're using. It won't be able to tell how many times the article has been cited in articles or books that aren't in that database.
Primary Sources are:
In contrast, Secondary Sources summarize, analyze or report the work of other researchers.
The most common type of journal article you will find in the sciences deals with primary research. These articles describe an original experiment or analysis that adds to current knowledge a particular topic.
Typically, Primary journal articles will have a common structure that includes:
Look for a Methods or Methods and Materials Section as a quick check to see if an article may be primary. Read this section to see if the researchers are talking about their new research.
"A primary source...was created at the time of the event...or by people who were observers of, or participants in, that event. ... The medium of the primary source can be anything, including written texts, objects, buildings, films, paintings, cartoons, etc."
Source: Professor Elspeth H. Brown, Dept. of History, University of Toronto
For help finding primary sources, explore the following research guides:
1. Find your book by looking in the catalogue part of LibrarySearch, then look for the link icon in the book's catalogue record.
2. Click on the link icon to open up the window that contains a permanent link to the catalogue record for this book. A permanent link is also known as a permalink, or a durable link.
3. Cut and paste the link into your email or other document.
1. Find your article in LibrarySearch, remembering to choose Articles.
2. Click on the link icon to open up the window that contains a permanent link to the article record
3. Cut and paste the link into your email or other document.
For more information on using all the many features and functions of LibrarySearch, have a look at this guide on using the new system.
Student library jobs for the Central Library system are posted and applied for online. The bulk of the hiring for each academic year is done in August, but positions may be posted at any time. Check the website regularly for new postings.
Access Pubmed from a link found on a University of Toronto library website to get to all the full text that University of Toronto affiliated individuals are entitled to. You should see myaccess.library.utoronto.ca in the PubMed URL once you have arrived.
The commonly used link to PubMed (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/) only gives access to a small number of freely available full text journals while the links to PubMed found on University of Toronto library websites give access to thousands of journals.