Every hour the UOC community downloads close to 500 items from the Library
Subject: Multidisciplinary
Students and teaching and research staff downloaded nearly five million items last year
Books, images and videos; if you're about to start the semester, here's an explanation of the information the Library offers you
The UOC community is consulting and downloading an ever increasing amount of digital content from the Library, including books, book chapters, articles and conference proceedings. That is the conclusion of the latest report on the use of the collection. What increased the most in 2021 was the number of items downloaded, up from two million in 2017 to nearly five million in 2021.
Before the start of the semester, let us tell you about the Library, its collection and the content most frequently consulted by the university community.
Total searches 2021 1,5 M
+ 21%
Total downloads 2021
4,8 M
+ 18.9%
What will you find in it?
The Library contains thousands of resources that have been specifically selected for their quality and relevance to the university's areas of study. The gateway to all this information is the Library search engine, where you can consult the following items:
The most visited digital collections
In the Library, you can consult packages with digital content covering various subjects, formats (patents, videos, standards, etc.) and geographical scopes (international, national, regional, etc.).
You can find most collections by entering the name directly into the search engine. You can also see the resources that are available to you for your courses in Search the digital collection by field.
The most downloaded collections in 2021.
At the forefront of the UOC community's preferred resources is the O'Reilly platform. It is closely followed by the legal databases.
Favourite sections
Apart from information from the search engine and digital collections, the Library has information for your assignments and final projects, such as tips for improving academic writing, avoiding plagiarism, making presentations, and citing sources of information.
There are also the library guides, which contain information curated by a team of librarians, working with the faculties and research centres.
The pages with the most visits in the last academic year (from September 2021 to July 2022) were as follows:
More and more digital documents are being downloaded by Library users. Downloads of the Library's content increased for the fifth year runningThe most visited Library guides
21,000
7,200
5,000
Software 4,900
Law Open Resources 4,300
English language resources 
We recommend
- Get to know the Library's search engine
- Millions of high-definition images you can use in your work
- Don't miss out on these tips and resources to help you pass your final tests
- Search the digital collection by field
- Copyright, Creative Commons and the public domain: what's the difference?
- Free image and video banks for your projects and presentations
