On Tuesday 22nd April (Tuesday of 0th Week of Trinity Term), our Term time opening hours will begin.
From this date the library will be open:
Monday – Friday 9:00 – 22:00
Saturday 10:00 – 18:00
Sunday 11:00 – 19:00
Please note that we will be closed for the Easter break as follows:
We will re-open on Monday 21st April from 9am – 7pm.
We will be closed for the Easter break as follows:
We will re-open on Monday 21st April from 9am – 7pm.
See the SSL website for our full opening hours.
Each month, one of our Subject Librarians chooses an electronic resource which they feel will be of interest to you.
April’s Resource of the Month has been selected by Helen Worrell, Subject Consultant for Anthropology.
Helen’s choice is Anthropological Fieldwork Online.
Anthropological Fieldwork Online brings the fieldwork underpinning the great ethnographies of the early 20th century into the digital world. This fully indexed, primary source database unfolds the historical development of anthropology from a global perspective, bringing together the work of early scholars who shaped the theories and methods students learn about, critique and re-shape today.
Anthropological Fieldwork Online available to access via SOLO.
A Single-Sign-On (SSO) is required to access this database remotely, as it is restricted to Oxford University students and staff members.
The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.
April’s Book of the Month was selected by Helen Worrell, Subject Consultant for Anthropology.
Casey High
Translating worlds, defending land : collaborations for indigenous rights and environmental politics in Amazonia
Stanford University Press, 2025
Available as an eBook via SOLO
This book is a result of long term fieldwork in Amazonian Ecuador, the author critically explores collaboration as a method for engagement with indigenous communities. It expands on the scholarly debates around engaged anthropology and who ethnography is for. This ethnography is a key contribution to the understanding of the process of anthropological research and the communities they engage with.
“Casey High offers us a brilliant ethnography in the form of fluid and intimate writing, which makes the book a page turner. What we see in these pages is the inauguration of a new line of anthropological reflection, in which collaboration between anthropologists and Indigenous people ceases to be a simple method and becomes the very object of analysis.”
Aparecida Vilaça, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
“In this thought-provoking meditation on the dynamics of collaboration, Casey High explores what it means for anthropology and anthropologists when our epistemic partners start doing ethnography their own way, for their own ends.”
Stuart Kirsch, University of Michigan
“Narrating in Waorani lands (that are also Ecuadorian), this strong and delicate ethnography also narrates us. Relentlessly written from a ‘complex we’ the stories it tells make it clear that ‘we’ have interlocutors and are interlocutors and that therefore, ‘we’ tell stories about ‘them’ that are also about ‘us’… ethnographic relations as moebius strip!”
Marisol de la Cadena, University of California, Davis
This title is available as an eBook which can be accessed from any Bodleian Library computer or used remotely, by logging on to SOLO with your SSO.
What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.
The end of term is approaching and that means our vacation loans will be starting shortly.
Vacation loans will begin on Monday 10th March (Monday of 8th week of Hilary Term).
Any books borrowed on or after this date will be due back in the first week of next term on Tuesday 29th April.
Any books eligible for renewal will also automatically renew until Tuesday 29th April when they reach their current due date.
Any questions on the above? Please do contact us.
Each month, one of our Subject Librarians chooses an electronic resource which they feel will be of interest to you.
March’s Resource of the Month has been selected by Andy Kernot, Subject Consultant for Geography, Social Policy & Intervention, Public Policy, and Internet Studies.
Andy’s choice is Policy Commons. It was chosen as a comprehensive source of grey literature that brings together in one site access to 17 million reports from over 41,000 different sources. It is currently available on trial until end of the March.
Policy Commons, provided by Coherent Digital, offers access in one uniform site to millions of reports and grey literature from NGOs, research centres, think tanks, and government agencies. Content is both multi-disciplinary and international in scope with coverage spanning 160 countries. Grey literature is often more current than traditional publications and Policy Commons adds thousands of new documents weekly to its platform. It also works to offset vulnerabilities grey literature faces by preserving it with permanent identifiers when it is harvested.
Policy Commons is available to access via SOLO.
A Single-Sign-On (SSO) is required to access this database remotely, as it is restricted to Oxford University students and staff members.
As this resource is on trial please forward any feedback you may have on it to Andy Kernot.
The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.
March’s Book of the Month was selected by Andy Kernot, Subject Consultant for Geography, Social Policy & Intervention, Public Policy, and Internet Studies.
Humans versus nature
Daniel R. Headrick
Oxford University Press, 2020
This book examines the adversarial relationship between the human and natural worlds and how the unintended consequences of human actions threaten humanity and the Earth. It shows how this relationship has been in existence since the stone age and that the development of technologies in recent centuries has accelerated the human impact on the environment.
Daniel R. Headrick shows how environmental changes–epidemics, climate shocks, and volcanic eruptions–have moulded human societies and cultures, sometimes overwhelming them. At the same time, he traces the history of anthropogenic changes in the environment–species extinctions, global warming, deforestation, and resource depletion–back to the age of hunters and gatherers and the first farmers and herders. He shows how human interventions such as irrigation systems, over-fishing, and the Industrial Revolution have in turn harmed the very societies that initiated them. Throughout, Headrick examines how human-driven environmental changes are interwoven with larger global systems, dramatically reshaping the complex relationship between people and the natural world. In doing so, he roots the current environmental crisis in the deep past.
“…the ultimate reference work on global environmental history.”
Eric L. Jones, University of Buckingham, EH.net
“Headrick’s book is the most comprehensive global environmental history in existence. It synthesizes vast knowledge from several scholarly disciplines into a coherent story of the 300,000-year human adventure on — and with — Earth. If one has time to read only one environmental history book, this should be the one.”
J.R. McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World
“Humans versus Nature is a gift to students and teachers of environmental history: a single volume that captures the vast scope and scale of nature’s role in human history and humanity’s accelerating impact on the natural world.”
Sam White, author of A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America
We have two lending copies of this book. One is currently located on our New Books Display Area (around the corner from our Issue Desk) and the other copy can be found on our open shelves at shelfmark is GF75.HEA 2020.
What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.
Looking for a space to have a discussion, engage in group work or practise a presentation?
The SSL has two Discussion Rooms that are available to book by any reader for academic purposes.
Large Discussion Room – Seats 16
Small Discussion Room – Seats 8
Both rooms are equipped with whiteboards and projectors. Marker pens, board rubbers and remote controls for the projectors can be borrowed from the issue desk. Power sockets are also available. Both rooms have dimmer switches, so you can choose the light level you require.
Booking a room is easy using our online room booking tool.
You can use the search options on this page to check availability and place a booking for your chosen times.
Use the Search by Time tab to select a room and check for availability for a specific date and time.
Use the Search by Space tab to select a room and browse for available times.
Fair Use Rules
You will receive an immediate confirmation, which includes a link to cancel your booking if your plans change.
Note: Currently only University members can use the booking tool as it requires an email address ending in ox.ac.uk.
Bodleian Reader Card holders: please email ssl@bodleian.ox.ac.uk with details of your requested booking. Please include the date, start time, finish time and the number of attendees.
Are the SSL rooms already booked at the time you require?
You can use the online room bookings tool to search for availability in other nearby Bodleian Libraries:
The Bodleian Libraries has arranged a trial to Coherent Digital’s platform, Policy Commons, until the end of March 2025. This has wide appeal for the social sciences in allowing access to material not always readily available. ‘Grey literature is not, by definition, distributed by commercial publishers and made discoverable so it is often underutilized and not citable. Policy Commons brings grey literature into the permanent scholarly record alongside journal articles and books’ (Coherent Digital promotional literature).
This platform offers access in one uniform site to 3.5 million reports and grey literature from NGOs, research centres, think tanks, and government agencies. Content is both multi-disciplinary and international in scope with coverage spanning 160 countries. Grey literature is often more current than traditional publications and Policy Commons adds thousands of new documents weekly to its platform.
Policy Commons is accessible either via SOLO or through Databases A-Z (under Useful Links on the front page of SOLO). Please forward feedback to Sarah Rhodes (Subject Consultant for International Development, Forced Migration, and African & Commonwealth Studies) or Andy Kernot (Subject Consultant for Geography, Social Policy & Intervention, Public Policy, and Internet Studies).
Each month, one of our Subject Librarians chooses an electronic resource which they feel will be of interest to you.
February’s Resource of the Month has been selected by John Southall, Bodleian Data Librarian and Subject Consultant for Economics and Sociology.
John’s choice is TDM Studio, a text and data mining platform that enables researchers to extract new value from the library’s ProQuest collections and its coverage of dissertations, newspapers, and journals. All text and data mining rights are cleared for immediate access.
TDM Studio a web-based, collaborative text and data mining platform that allows you to access and analyse large amounts of text data from ProQuest databases in a Jupyter Notebook environment.
Researchers can work either individually or collaboratively and are assigned a coding workbench. They can then build a corpus based on potentially millions of articles or other content and conduct data analysis, text mining, and visualization to uncover new relationships, patterns, and connections. Proficiency in R or Python programming languages is useful but not necessary. For those who prefer to explore the data without writing code, there are visualization tools that allow them to interact with data using a graphical interface.
A Bodleian Subject and Research Guide has been published to support this and other resources as well as outline the principles of Text and Data Mining.
This resource can be accessed via SOLO.
Anyone with a valid University of Oxford email address can request access to TDM Studio. To request an account and workbench, please fill out this form. By default, each workbench can support 1-5 users.
To access your account once created visit https://tdmstudio.proquest.com/home and login with your University of Oxford email.