Welcome to the Collections Guide.

King's Libraries & Collections offer a huge multidisciplinary information resource base including over 1.2 million printed books and ebooks; more than 60,000 journals, reference tools, statistical data, official publications, maps, music scores, multimedia resources, photographs and manuscripts, as well as Archives (5 million items) and Special Collections of international standing.

This guide will highlight the online resources most relevant to your subject area. 

While a great deal of academic research is hidden behind paywalls, undoing this and sharing publications openly is becoming increasingly important to aid and advance scholarly communication around the world. Google Scholar is a useful search engine for finding material which has been published openly, but there are a range of other tools you can use to find this type of research. There are also a range of discipline-specific repositories, which are covered in the individual subject guides. 

The following three databases and not subject specific and so are really useful tools for a wide range of subject areas. As different databases have different strengths, it is worthwhile learning how to use and get the best out of a number of different systems. Using databases effectively will allow you to discover material much more effectively than using search engines and in Library Search.