Library services

How to find the library, register and access its catalogue.

Location

The Library is situated on the lower ground floor of Samuel Alexander Building.

Opening hours - semester

9.30am - 7pm, Monday to Thursday

9.30am - 5pm, Friday

Opening hours - vacation

9.30am - 1pm and 2pm - 5pm, Monday to Friday

Resources and catalogue information

The Library stocks a wide variety of materials in text, audio, CD-ROM and DVD formats, and there is a wide range of world cinema titles.

Resources are shelved by format, and corresponding items (from the same title) have the same catalogue number.

Audiobooks and eBooks

  • LibriVox - free audiobooks from the public domain (via podcast or catalogue)
  • Project Gutenberg - the oldest producer of free online books

Registration

  • All staff and students of The University of Manchester - including students attending University language courses for members of the public - are entitled to register with the ULC Library.
  • Registration is free to all staff and students of the University of Manchester.

Security, loans and fines

  • Borrowing rights are available to registered members of the ULC only.
  • All loans are free of charge
  • All loans are made against staff/student ID cards.
  • Students may borrow up to three titles at a time (which may consist of several components, eg book, DVD, CD).
  • Many resources can be borrowed for up to a week, with the option to renew the loan.
  • Some reserve list resources are only available from Reception. In such cases, student ID is retained by the ULC until return of the loan.
  • Late return of materials will incur a fine: £1 per day (overnight/weekly) and £2 per day (reserve list), up to the replacement value of the item(s) borrowed.

Please note: An alarm will sound if members attempt to remove items from the library without authorisation.

Loans can be renewed:

Full details of the cataloguing system and loans policy are in the Library User Guide, available from Reception.

Languages

The ULC library stocks resources in the following languages.

Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Basque, Bengali, British Sign Language (BSL), Bulgarian, Burmese, Cambodian, Cantonese, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, Flemish, French, Gaelic (Scottish), German, Greek, Gujarati, Hausa, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi/Urdu, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Kurdish, Lakota, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Malay, Marathi, Mohawk, Mongolian, Navajo, Norwegian, Panjabi , Passamaquoddy, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Serbo-Croat, Sinhalese, Slovak, Slovene, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Taiwanese, Tamil, Thai, Tibetan, Tswa, Turkish, Ukrainian, Uzbekh, Vietnamese, Welsh, Wolof, Yoruba, Yucatec Maya, Zulu.

Conversation room

The conversation room, adjacent to the ULC Library, is available for small group work, Face-to-Face meetings, voice recordings etc. To book this room, ask at Reception. Digital recorders (for use in the conversation room only) can be borrowed from reception. Recordings can then be transferred into various formats.

Face-to-Face

The Face-to-Face scheme is a way to meet up with native speakers of different languages, to exchange conversation. Contact details of language learners are displayed on the Face-to-Face board in the ULC reception area. This scheme is open to all staff and students of the University of Manchester. To join the scheme, ask at ULC Library reception for a card to complete, or contact angela.farrand@manchester.ac.uk