For SIA MA and PGDip students: humanities library providing evening and weekend study space
Senate House Library homepage
Senate House Library catalogue
Included in Library Hub Discover? Yes
Access
The library's opening hours change depending on the day of the week and whether it is term time or vacation at the University of London. The library is generally open seven days a week. At some times, e.g. all day on Sundays, the library is unstaffed and you can only gain access if you have already collected your library card.
It is also possible to pay to rent a private study carrel.
All reading rooms are silent, but it is possible to book, for free, a group study room. Demand is often high, so please aim to make your booking well in advance. It is also possible to meet for group study sessions in the cafe outside the library, in the basement of Senate House. More study spaces are available, though not at the weekends or in the evenings, elsewhere in the building in BLOOM@senatehouse.
For an introduction to the library, you can book a 30-minute tour. These are currently offered at 2pm on Fridays.
Contact
+44(0) 20 7862 8500 senatehouselibrary@london.ac.uk (map)
contact details for individual collection librarians
Collections
Contains 2 million books, specialising in a wide range of subjects in humanities. For many students the library will be most useful for works discussing history, society and politics, rather than art or business specifically. Specialisms include:
Online resources and wi-fi
There is a large collection of online resources, including a good number not available at SIA. They can be accessed either on your own device, once you are connected to Senate House Library wifi, or from one of the free laptops available to borrow. No online resources can be accessed outside the library, but it is possible to download or print individual articles and chapters.
Among the databases most relevant to art or luxury are British and Irish Furniture Makers Online, The Grand Tour, the Harper's Bazaar Archive, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, the Vogue Archive and World's Fairs.
There is a particularly good collection of resources for LGBTQ+ studies: Archives of Sexuality & Gender, Defining Gender, 1450-1910, the Digital Transgender Archive, Gender: Identity and Social Change, the LGBT Magazine Archive, and LGBT Thought and Culture.
There is also a very wide range of resources for economic, social and political history. The following very small selection will give some sense of the breadth of coverage in this important part of the Library's collection: African Diaspora: Cultural, Social and Political History, American Consumer Culture, American Indian Histories and Culture, Disability in the Modern World and Empire Online.
Help with your research
The collection librarians (contact details above) are available to help identify relevant resources in the collection.