Seven Easy Ways to Engage with Us

1. Ask A Librarian in email, or chat with us in real time


Ask A Librarian is our central email service: you can ask questions big or small, request a consultation on Zoom. Librarians monitor the site throughout the day, during weekday evenings, and on the weekends.  Typically, you'll get a response within a few hours -- and certainly with 24 hours of submitting your question. 

The Ask a Librarian page also features a growing knowledge base of FAQs which you can explore for quick answers to common questions. 

For live help, you can always access the chat feature that appears to the right on HOLLIS screens and other library webpages. When classes are in session, regular hours are:

M-Th, 9am-9pm |  Fri, 9am-7pm | Sat, 9am-5pm | Sun, 12noon-7pm

2. Explore our Research Guides and Research Quickstart FAQs


Librarians across University create these resource lists and tutorials for courses, for academic fields, for specialized topics, and for interdisciplinary subjects. Browsing or searching across them can often identify materials, databases, sites, and strategies that might be help move your project forward.

3. Check out our Events Calendar of upcoming workshops, tours, and other events hosted by Harvard Library for the Harvard community:


Coming Next School Year: Unabridged (Exclusively for Graduate Students), a multi-day library research intensive designed to help you lay the groundwork for a career in academic research and writing.

  • Sign up now to receive Unabridged program news and workshop announcements, including a notification when our application cycle begins for the January 2024 intensive.
  • Look out for term-time “Bookends” workshops to the series.

4. Register for access to our Virtual Media Lab 


Library technologists can assist with creating podcasts, editing videos, using Adobe Creative Cloud, VR, and more.  They hold regular office hours on Zoom, to which you can drop in; they also do personalized consults. 

 

5. Showcase your research results with help from a Data Visualization Librarian


Staff can consult on design principles, and show you tools like Tableau, Google Data Studio, Gelphi, and more.

 

6. Get advice from the Digital Scholarship Support Group about tools and methods you can use


A cross-university of team of faculty, technologists, digital humanities specialists, and librarians teach programs like Scalar and NVivo, hold drop-in office hours and schedule more formal consults with researchers.  If you're curious about Digital Scholarship but still new to the field, you can even enroll (free) in their asynchronous EdX course, Introduction to Digital Humanities.

 

7. Know your (copy)rights: Talk with a Copyright First Responder 


CFRs are librarians, archivists and museum staff across the library system who are trained in areas of copyright law and policy that most affect academic research and scholarship.

  • Check in with a CFR before you inquire about permission to use copyrighted material in your own work; we can help you determine who and how to ask-- and whether you need to (it may be "Fair Use")! 
  • Use the link above to locate a CFR.