Library

St Catherine’s College Library in Oxford is an architecturally brave building, where students can reflect and think in its beautiful spaces, as much as they can be social and academically adventurous. With its 60000 books and modern resources, it actively contributes to the atmosphere of openness and friendliness that greatly affirms the College’s primary mission:

The pursuit of academic excellence, the enhancement of creative thinking, learning, education and research in the arts and sciences in equal part.

It treasures the traditional values of Oxford college life, but its modern architecture gives it a distinctive ability to pursue a modern agenda. The motto, Nova et Vetera (the new and the old), reflects this.

The library is maintained for the primary use of undergraduates and aims to acquire core texts for all undergraduate and graduate courses taught at the College. If you would like to make a recommendation, please email the librarians at library@stcatz.ox.ac.uk.  Alternatively email your tutors asking them to forward details to us to support the recommendation.

All books in the library are included in the electronic catalogue, SOLO, which in turn forms part of the wider Oxford University libraries network. The library is wired for access to electronic library resources and to the Internet. There are 3 computer terminals, including two catalogue PCs, a high-quality photocopy/scanner/printer machine available in the library foyer for students’ use and wireless connectivity for laptop users. New books are constantly being added to the College Library, at the recommendation of either Tutors or students and from undergraduate and graduate reading lists. A separate College Law library houses law reports and journals.

Michaelmas 2023

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The Library reading rooms will be closed for Michaelmas term, until further notice. 

Students can reserve St Catherine’s College books via the Library catalogue SOLO with the Click and Collect system.

Books collection and return will be in the Library FOYER open every day between 9am and midnight.

Remote library support will be available Monday-Friday between 9am and 5pm. Please, email us at library@stcatz.ox.ac.uk

Library Induction videos for New and Returning students

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1.Welcome to Oxford and St Catherine’s College Library

Borrowing and returning Books

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Please reserve your printed books with the Click and Collect system on SOLO (Monday-Sunday).

  • Sign in on SOLO using your email credentials
  • Search for your book
  • Go to Find and Request and select St Catherine’s College Library
  • Click the Request button
  • If the book has the status “Available”, you should receive an email the next morning between 9.30am and 10.30am confirming that it is ready to collect.
  • You have 48 hours to collect your book after receiving the notification email. Please do get in touch if you are unable to do so but would still like to borrow it.
  • It will be on your library account at the time of the collection.
  • If the book is not available because is on loan (the status on SOLO shows a due date), you can collect it within 7 days after receiving the notification email. The notification email will be triggered when the book is returned by the previous reader.
  • It will be on your library account at the time of the collection.
  • You can still borrow up to 12 books for 4 weeks or until the end of term (the last Friday of week 8th), whichever comes first. You can borrow books for the vacation period.
  • Overdue books incur fines of 10p per book per day. You will be sent reminders to renew your books just before they are due, and once they have become overdue. Please do not ignore these emails, and check your spam folder!

Please return your books in the designated crates on the Library ground floor, under the new books display desk.

You can browse the library shelves and pick up the books you wish to consult in the Library. When you finish with these, please, return them in the designated crates in the ground floor.

You can also borrow books after browsing the shelves. Click and Collect is preferred and encouraged.

 

Contact

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library@stcatz.ox.ac.uk
01865 281582 (enquiry desk and office)

Facebook

www.facebook.com/stcatzlibrary

Twitter

@StCatzLib

Opening Hours

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The Library term time opening hours are:

Monday-Friday: 8am-midnight

Saturday-Sunday: 9am-midnight

Please check this website, your emails, Twitter and Facebook regularly for updates.

Vacation opening

The library maintains term-time hours from 0th week in Michaelmas Term to 9th or 10th week in Trinity Term, with the exception of Christmas and Easter closure periods. Any changes to this will be posted on the library door, website, and social media pages.

Archives

Despite its modern foundation, St. Catherine’s College has an important Archive. The role of the College Archives is to preserve a record of the life of the College – both an institutional record, and a less formal picture of the life of the College community.

The Archive, based in the Library North seminar room, contains a small number of records relating to the Delegacy and a larger number relating to the foundation of the College, in addition to administrative records. The Archive primarily collects material relating to students, events in College, and commentary on College architecture.

The principal objective of the Archive is to collect, preserve, and promote the use of records documenting the history of the College. This includes records of its administration and finances, land and property ownership, and individual members of College. It aims to support the College’s educational, cultural, and charitable objectives, and to be a repository of evidence and information valuable to professional and private researchers alike.

The Archive is looked after by Barbara Costa, College Archivist and Librarian.

For enquiries and appointments, contact:

barbara.costa@stcatz.ox.ac.uk 01865 281588

Acquisition Policy

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Please see our Acquisition Policy here.

For enquiries and appointments, contact:

barbara.costa@stcatz.ox.ac.uk 01865 281588

Index to the Archives

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Please see the Index to the Archives here.

For enquiries and appointments, contact:

barbara.costa@stcatz.ox.ac.uk 01865 281588

IT

All students at St Catherine’s College are provided with an account on the college NetWare servers, this username and password combination allows access to the computers in the Library, JCR and Staircase 18 computer rooms mentioned below. More information can be found here.

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Opening Hours

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Library Computer Room: 08:30 – 23:55
Staircase 18 Computer Room Closed
JCR Email room: 08:00-24:00

The opening hours of the library and JCR, when different, supersede those given here.

Student Computer Rooms

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There are three rooms in college equipped for computers for use by students:

  • Library computer room; this contains 10 PCs, a colour laser printer.
  • JCR computer room; located next to the JCR this facility is open to all college members and contains 5 PCs, and a photocopier / printer A4 and A3.

The Library Computer Room

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A small charge is levied for printing to cover the cost of consumables and is paid for in advance via the uPay system. Students will be advised of the current charging scheme on arrival. This is currently 4 pence per sheet of A4 black-and-white printing and 10 pence per sheet for colour printing, also A4.

Common software packages that are available to students include Microsoft and Corel Office suites for general word processing, spreadsheet, database and presentation preparation; eXceed for running X-windows, and SPSS for statistics. Each user is allocated 10GB of disk space on a central fileserver; this is quite generous and extensions will only rarely be considered and then only if sufficient resources are available. Files stored on local disks should not be considered secure nor safe from deletion.

All students are given a username and password for access to networked computers. Without the correct combination it is impossible to log on to any computer and use your home directory. Students wishing to make use of the College email facilities must first register individually for an email account with Oxford University Computing Services, email account details are generally provided on arrival for those starting a course at Catz. Once these details are obtained, a variety of email packages are available for use on personally owned computers; instructions for configuring popular email packages is provided by OUCS With regard to PCs found in computer rooms, email should only be used on the machines set aside for that purpose within the email room. Internet access is also available from machines within the student computer rooms.

All student rooms have data-points for connection to the Internet. These are standard RJ-45 sockets operating at either 100Mb/s or 1Gb/s. Students wishing to connect their machines to the data network must register their machines – this process can be conducted online via web-form and does not require a prior visit to the IT office.

Student views on matters of college computing are aired to the IT Committee by two representatives, one from the JCR and another from the MCR. Matters that require prompt resolution should be directed to the appropriate student representative, or, when necessary, the College IT Officer. General information regarding computing issues specific to the college network may be found on posters distributed in the student computing rooms. For additional IT information, please contact us. For news about changes in how IT is provided at St Catherine’s please follow our Catz IT twitterfeed.

Printing

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Connecting To Networked Printers From Personal Computers and other Devices.

College members may print to networked printers via either document submission by e-mail or uploading to a web portal. Accepted formats include Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, PDF, JPG, GIF, PNG, TIF, and TXT . Users wishing to print other file formats should either convert the document to PDF format prior to submission, or print locally in one of the College’s computer rooms.

Printing documents submitted by e-mail

Send an e-mail with the documents attached that you would like to print, to printing@stcatz.ox.ac.uk, submitted jobs will then be queued until released. Please note that print jobs may only be submitted from your primary University account.

After submitting your print job visit here, login (using your College network credentials), select the ‘My Print Jobs’ tab where you will be able to select your desired destination printer and available (advanced) options such specifying pages, duplexing, or forced monochrome printing.

Printing documents via upload to a web portal

Using your preferred web browser visit here, login (using your College network credentials), and select the ‘Web Print’ tab.

Select whether you wish to print a particular web page (in which case enter the appropriate URL in the field provided), or a specific file. In the latter case ‘Browse’ for the desired file and once selected click on the ‘Next’ button after which you will be able to select your desired destination printer and available (advanced) options such specifying pages, duplexing, or forced monochrome printing.

In case of difficulties please contact the College’s IT staff.