Courses and training offered by the UL in one information literacy portal

The University Library (UL) offers courses and training that make it easy for students to effectively and efficiently access information that is available only through the University Library. The University Library also offers courses and training that enable you to optimize free searching on the web.

The (digital) collection of the University Library…

The University Library offers access to a large number of printed and digital quality resources: about one million books, eighteen thousand electronic journals, three hundred specialized databases and almost three hundred thousand e-books.

The UL’s digital supply (electronic journals, databases, e-books) gets its quality primarily from the development process of the products themselves. A publication is included in a scholarly journal only if recognized scholars approve it; databases and e-books go online only if the makers or publishers expect sufficient interest in relation to the incurred costs. In this way, a quality filter is put in place.

 …for a price

The UL’s supply does have a price tag: Erasmus University pays—via the UL—about three million Euros per year to producers of scholarly information in order to be able to offer this closed quality information to researchers, professors and students. ‘Closed’ means that you must be affiliated with Erasmus University Rotterdam in order to have access to these resources.

Free searching on the web

It’s becoming more and more common for researchers, professors and students to search for their scholarly information directly through the web, without recourse to a library. On the one hand, this method can lead to quick results, on the other hand, it could raise problems. For example, how do you determine the scholarly value of the information you find if you do not know or have insufficient knowledge of the context within which the information was created? What can you do with such information—from a scholarly point of view?

Another problem is that you often do not know whether the search engine searched through all available information or whether the information was preselected. Let’s assume that you know how the information was created. In such cases, you still may have missed important information that you didn’t know existed.

Instructions, courses, trainings and workshops

We offer the following:

• Practical instructions that answer concrete questions like “Where do I find what I need in the UL?” “How does using the catalogue and borrowing work?”
• General courses that go more in depth into the acquisition and handling of scholarly information: “How can I search effectively within the supply of scholarly journals?” “How do I go about correctly referencing and citing information?” “How do I find my way around within government information?”
• Discipline-specific courses, which go more in depth into searching for and finding information within specific fields: economics and management, social sciences, law, philosophy, etc.
• Training and workshops, also known as tutorials. The focus here is on meetings in which participants get hands-on practice in acquiring a certain skill or competency. Examples are the RefWorks Training, the EDSC Workshop and the workshop ‘Searching and Finding: Context and Quality’ (FHKW workshop).

These are offered both in a standard format and in a customized format. In the latter case, the UL focuses on giving a concrete answer to specific requests from a faculty or course. ‘Customized’ also means that we can offer courses and training at any level desired.

It's all available here through this portal.