Library Services
Reference inquiries, research consultations, and digital project assistance
The ISAW Dissertation Collection provides graduates of ISAW the option of depositing an electronic copy of their dissertation with NYU to provide long-term storage and online access to their work. The ISAW Dissertation Collection is hosted by NYU’s institutional repository, the Faculty Digital Archive (archive.nyu.edu
The Dissertation Collection is intended to promote access to and scholarly reuse of NYU dissertations, benefitting dissertation authors, NYU Libraries, and the greater scholarly community.
More information on the ISAW Dissertation Collection is available here.
ISAW students, faculty, and researchers are encouraged to recommend titles for purchase. To do so, use the ISAW ticket system. Include the phrase “Book request” in your subject line, and select “library” as the department. It is also a good idea to add David Ratzan (dr128@nyu.edu) and Gabriel Mckee (gm95@nyu.edu) to the “CC” line.
Please include as much bibliographic information as possible in your request. Where available, include an ISBN, publisher link, Worldcat link, and/or other useful information to help us track down a title.
We strive to be responsive to purchase requests, and if a title is within our scope, available for purchase, and priced reasonably, we will typically purchase it.
Reference inquiries, research consultations, and digital project assistance
Our library staff is happy to handle reference questions and provide research assistance. You can reach us via the Library’s contact page.
For help using library resources, finding research materials, and more, you can also use Bobst Library’s Ask-a-Librarian service.
The ISAW library offers ISAW-based workshops in a variety of digital tools, including Zotero, QGIS, and Pleiades. These workshops are announced in advance via the ISAW internal e-mail list. If you’d like to request a workshop on a particular tool or topic, please contact us.
Bobst Library’s Data Services department also offers frequent workshops and single-session classes on tools for data analysis, GIS, statistics, and more. A full list of classes is available here.
The ISAW Library offers a limited scanning service of materials from our collection for NYU faculty and doctoral students. This service is intended to expand access to the materials in our collection to Washington Square and the communities of NYU’s global campuses, as well as to ISAW faculty and students who are away from our facilities, for example at conferences, excavations, on sabbatical, or otherwise studying outside the metro region. We will attempt to respond to all requests within one business day of receipt, which is the NYU standard. Scans can be requested via the “Request” link in an item’s Bobcat record.
In using this service, we ask that you bear in mind three important points:
First, we have limited resources for this service. In order to ensure that we can deliver scans to ISAW community members year round, we ask that you only request scans when you are away from ISAW under the conditions above. That is to say, if you are resident and working from home or intending to work from home over a weekend or holiday, we ask that you continue to scan what you need yourself. Please also keep in mind that we employ students for most of the circulation work in the Library; so there will be times when we might be slow in honoring requests, e.g., if we are lightly staffed around exam time or during the winter recess, or receive an inordinately high volume of requests right before a holiday. Similarly, there are no staff in the ISAW Library on weekends; therefore requests placed on Friday will likely be honored by late Monday or early Tuesday.
Second, please note that scan requests that exceed the fair use guidelines, as determined by NYU, cannot be fulfilled. Generally speaking, these guidelines forbid us from scanning more than two chapters or 20% of a single work. For more information on fair use guidelines at NYU, please see NYU’s copyright guide.
Third, at this time you may only request scans of monographs or monographic series through Bobcat. We are already working on extending this service to the journals in our collection. For the time being, if you need to request a scan of a journal article, please e-mail a request containing the full article citation directly to ISAW-Library@nyu.edu.