Get Help

How Can the Library Help you?

Find Books and Resources

  • Library catalog – Search our collections for books, articles, digital resources, maps, media, archival materials, and more.
  • Ask a Librarian – Submit a question to our library staff.
  • Library to library delivery – Request items from across campus to be delivered to a more convenient pick-up location.
  • BorrowDirect and Interlibrary Loan – Borrow items Cornell doesn’t own from one of our thousands of partner libraries.
  • Online databases – Search in top databases to find relevant research materials.
  • Guides and tutorials – Take advantage of our skill guides that can help orient you to the literature of dozens of subjects and courses.

Connect with an Expert

  • Meet with a librarian – We offer research consultation services for students, faculty, and staff. These are in-depth, customized, one-on-one meetings to discuss resources and search strategies for projects big and small.
  • Library liaisons – We have subject specialists who provide support for faculty and student research, instruction, and scholarly communication, who build rich library collections, or who can refer you to other library experts.
  • Personal librarian program – Get paired up with a library expert who can help you navigate your first year on campus.

Access Our Collections

  • Browse our rich collections – Come to our libraries, or use our remote browsing guide for online browsing options across libraries.
  • Contactless pickup – When you have no time to find books on the shelves, request your items in the catalog. We will ready them for pickup at your convenience.
  • Scanning services – We can email you chapter and article scans from our collections.
  • Recommend a purchase – We will do our best to fulfill Cornell community members’ requests for books and other items.
  • Off campus access with Passkey – When you’re off campus, connect to journals, databases, and e-books that would otherwise be restricted or hidden behind paywalls.

Develop Skills

  • Workshops – We offer a wide variety of open workshops designed to help you in developing skills in library research, information management, and computer applications.
  • Evidence synthesis – We can help support a range of review methodologies, including systematic reviews, scoping reviews, evidence gap maps, umbrella reviews, and others.
  • Research data management – Need help creating a data management plan or managing your data? We can help.
  • Digital mapping and GIS – We can help you access GIS software and learn how to use it, find geospatial data, connect with the local and regional GIS user groups, and get help when you need it.
  • Text mining and data visualization – We offer workshops and consultations to help integrate digital tools and techniques into scholarly work to extract data, identify trends, look for patterns, and better understand the relationships of terms within and between documents.