Research Guides: New to NYU Libraries: Welcome!

For further details about all library resources and services, see NYU Libraries' website.

Ways to improve your library research skills:

Research Guides provide a comprehensive approach to doing research within specific subject areas, e.g., business, cinema studies, psychology, etc.

Library workshops help you to learn your way around the library, use our search systems effectively, and utilize citation management tools to organize your research results

When you're new, the Libraries can feel overwhelming! The good news is, we're here to help. Don't be shy -- no question is too basic to ask.

Ways to get help:

Go to the Reference Desk on the 1st floor of Bobst Library
Use our Ask a Librarian service (email, chat, or text)
Make an appointment with a librarian

NYU Shanghai students: Freshman Research Readiness

NYU Abu Dhabi students: Library Resources for First-Year Students

What does NYU Libraries have to offer?

COLLECTIONS
- 4 million+ print books and 1 million+ ebooks, 90,000+ journal titles
- 1,200+ databases to search for full text articles, images, and more
- Thousands of videos and sound recordings
- Primary sources in our special collections and archives
- Music scores, playscripts, government documents, data sets, and more

GUIDES to research strategies in specific subject areas
TOOLS to organize your research results and create automatically formatted bibliographies
STUDY SPACES for individual and collaborative work
SERVICES such as reference, interlibrary loan, laptop loan, and more

New Graduate Students: see Graduate Student Services
New Faculty: see Library Services for Faculty

Bobst Library is the central library in the NYU Libraries system , housing 4 million volumes.

Library research vs. Web searching: What's the difference?

	LIBRARY RESEARCH	INTERNET SEARCHING
Search Tool:	Online Catalogs (NYU's catalog is called BobCat) and Article Databases (like JSTOR, Lexis-Nexis, PsycINFO)	Search and meta-search engines
What You'll Find:	Mostly books, periodical articles, and other published materials	Mostly Web sites
What It Costs:	Database subscriptions are costly, but NYU Libraries subscribes on behalf of the NYU community, so you don't have to pay for the articles you find.	Information on Web sites is generally free (but if you do find books and periodical articles, you usually have to pay for them).
Quality Control:	Books and journals are subject to various degrees of editorial review (pre-publication process of checking information for accuracy and credibility).	The Web is unfiltered. It's hard to separate the accurate information from the inaccurate.