How to Find Education Resources

The Sir Duncan Rice Library is on the west-side of campus off Bedford Road – you can’t miss it, it is the huge, stripy, glass building! Anyone can visit the Sir Duncan Rice Library but as a student you will need your University ID card to get in and borrow items.

Our opening hours vary depending on the time in the academic year – full details can be found here.

Undergraduates and taught Postgraduates can borrow up to 20 items, Research students can borrow up to 40. If you are an on campus student you will need your ID card and to set up a PIN to allow you to use the self-issue kiosks (these are like self-serve at the supermarket!). Details of how to set up a PIN are emailed out at the start of the first semester or you can email the Subject Team: library@abdn.ac.uk. 

If you are a part-time distance student with the School of Education, then a special postal service is available to you. Information can be found within your course in MyAberdeen - look out for the Library Resources or Materials section or check out our guide: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/library/documents/guides/qgedu003.pdf

There are many different loan periods depending on the demand on an item from Heavy Demand (overnight), right through to full academic year. All loans are subject to recall which means you may be asked to return items before the original due date.

You can find out about borrowing, loans and recalls on our Library website. 

As noted above we use Dewey Decimal to order our materials and Floors 3-7 are where we hold these. The Entrance or Ground Floor is where you will find the café and the Welcome Desk as well as the returns area and the main swipe gates into the Library. Floor 1 has the main issue desk, heavy demand area and various different study zones. Floor 2 has the main computer classrooms and the hard copy periodicals. Each of the ‘collection’ floors has various types of study space including silent study rooms, study desks, PCs and comfy seating. You will also find an enquiry point on these floors where you can ask for help finding that book you really need! You can find out more about the various types of study space on our website and more detail about how we organise the collections floors can be found in our library guides: The Floor 6 classmarks guide for the Social Sciences and Education and other Floor classmark guides.

In order to find your reading you should use our Resource Discovery tool which is called Primo. It allows you to search by title, author or even subject in order to find the e-link or the shelf location. Log in to Primo, click on advanced (to give you a really good search!) and then try one of the following:

• The Books+ tab lists the thousands of titles we have full immediate e-access to.
• The Articles+ tab details thousands of articles, book reviews and more.

Note, you won’t see these options in the Basic search screen you see when you first go to Primo.

There is a handy guide all about Primo. We have access to millions of items, some are in e-format, some are physical and held in one of our on campus libraries, but some are held in our store located a few miles away. Primo tells you where and how to access an item – anything not on campus or in e-format can be ‘requested’ using the link in Primo.

Social Theory offers an extensive selection of documents that explore the complexities and interpret the nature of social behaviour and organization. The collection includes more than 122,000 pages from 346 works by 100 authors. Highlights include 33 volumes of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels and nearly 26,000 pages of German language content. See the quick guide to the Social Theory database.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) covers open access journals from across the world and across many disciplines.

Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. Anyone can view public domain materials – some is not protected by copyright.

Scottish Government Education Policies gives links to all aspects of the Scottish Government’s education policy agenda including links to GIRFEC and SHANARRI as well as the National Improvement Framework and Improvement Plan 2020.

Education Scotland also provide links to the National Improvement Hub as well as links to school inspection reports and curricular materials.

Government Legislation can also be found from legislation.gov.uk such as Post-16 Education (Scotland) Act 2013 and Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017. For up-to-date versions of legislation please see Westlaw UK. 

Young Scot also provides useful resources such as the Youth Commission on Mental Health Services and their Engaging with Gaelic Online Report.

OECD iLibrary is the online library of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) featuring its books, working papers and statistics and is the gateway to OECD's analysis and data.  It contains content published by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), the OECD Development Centre, PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), and the International Transport Forum (ITF). e.g., Trends Shaping Education 2019.

Box of Broadcasts (BoB) contains BBC broadcasts since 1990s and permanent archive of BBC, ITV and Channel 4 and related broadcasts as well as recordings of 65 free to air tv channels - millions of broadcasts. Saved lists, create clips...

First things first – switch off EVERYTHING! That means no Insta, no email, no phone, nothing. Social media and email are massively distracting. You need to get in the ‘reading zone’. Find a comfortable, quiet space where you can sit with your device uninterrupted by anything and anyone. This is really hard to achieve but is really important to staying on point.

Next thing is related to the first – only look at one book or reading at a time. When you become more fluent at reading academic texts you can start to dip in and out of multiple items at a time, but for now we will concentrate on one text. You now need to consider what is it you are looking for? What questions are you hoping will be answered by reading this ebook? Make a note of your questions – you may find it easier to put them in a table, or in a list format. Do whatever works best for you.

Who has written the text you are reading? Has it been recommended by your Lecturer? Why? Is the author stating fact or opinion? Can you see similarities and parallels with your own ideas, practice or experience? If not, why not? It is not wrong to disagree with an author, you just have to be able to say why and back this up. Use the five ‘Ws’: Who? What? When? Where? Why? to help you work out if the author is credible. This is sometimes called the CRAAP Test Currency Relevancy Authority Accuracy Purpose - Do they have the knowledge and experience to be writing about this area?

It might be useful to use Stella Cottrell’s book – Critical Thinking Skills. Paper copies are in the Library and, although it is not available as an ebook there are some really useful sections on the book’s companion site especially the Chapter 9 learning resources, which gives you ‘concise critical notes for books’ – a table to complete for each book, who wrote it, what are the key arguments etc. etc. This is really helpful when you first start to read academic texts, some people continue to use them in their PhD studies!

Remember to always keep a note of the author, publisher, year of publication, title etc. of what you are reading. Then note the key points, your own comments and any questions raised. Create your own table or list – whatever works for you. This will form the basis of your assignment.