News

The UOC community downloads 4 million Library documents a year

Subject:  Multidisciplinary
Person consulting a computer
Author: Sandra Pérez (foto: Poike)
20/12/21

Nearly 500 documents are downloaded every hour by UOC students and teaching and research staff.

The Library has a wide range of digital resources such as articles, theses, books, news, case studies and videos.

Each year, the Library's website receives about four million visits. What are the most common searches for information? What are the most frequently searched resources?

The Library team periodically reviews the use of content and its adaptation to the needs of its users. As we are approaching the end of the year, we have reviewed the use made by the university community of the Library.

  • More and more digital documents are being downloaded by Library users. In two years the number of downloads has increased by 27%, from 3 million to about 4 million today.
  • In the last six months, the UOC community has used the Library’s search engine to locate legal platforms, such as Aranzadi or vLex; the SABI database, with general information and annual company accounts; as well as information about borderline personality disorder. Other popular searches are related to final projects, cognitive development and the cybercrime technique known as phishing.
  • At the forefront of the UOC community's preferred resources is the O'Reilly platform, which contains books, articles and audiovisual courses on computer science, technology and multimedia. It hosts, for example, books on programming languages such as Python, user experience, data visualization, and tutorials on using Adobe CC software. The Library's second most used resource is Ebook Central, a collection of thousands of digital books on a wide variety of topics. It is closely followed by the legal databases vLex and Mementos Francis Lefebvre.
  • 50% of the users of the Library come from Spain and 35% from Latin America.

The UOC Library was created in the late 1990s as the world's first completely digital library.

 

The recommendations of UOC experts

Inma Rodríguez, full professor of the Faculty of Economics and Business

Statista allows you to view statistics on industry, the markets and consumer product-market activity and ProQuest Central brings together some of the most robust and widely used databases for multidisciplinary research.

Rubén Nieto, member of the Faculty of Health Sciences

I use APA PsycTherapy to search for health and psychology topics relevant to my research, to keep up-to-date with scientific advances, and to search for specific scientific articles. It allows you to search and stay up-to-date fairly easily.

Lluc López, member of the Faculty of Law and Political Science

I recommend JSTOR to my students to perform an initial article search. They have to search by keyword, and from there they can check the list of results.

This latest version of the Library website was unveiled in September, at the start of the academic year, and so far it has been running alongside the previous version. Please note that the old Library website will no longer be available from 11 February 2022.