Library Resources Section

What do we do?

The Library Resources Section (LRS) is a busy and supportive team. We manage the House of Commons Library’s online resources, the collections of books, pamphlets, official publications, serials and newspapers, and the collection of hardcopy and digital parliamentary papers. We’re also responsible for the Library’s digitisation programme, for the binding and conservation of Library stock, and for the Library catalogue and discovery platform. We share this work across three teams:

Acquisitions and Online - manage and provide access to a range of information resources, including press aggregators, biographical resources, and legal and subject specific databases. We trial, purchase, manage and promote our resources. We ensure that procurement and financial rules are followed. Resources available to all Parliamentary users are provided through our pages on the Commons Library website. Some resources are limited to Library staff only and made available through our SharePoint site.

Cataloguing, Digitisation and Systems - responsible for the House of Commons Library management system (Koha), the discovery platform (Summon), and related data analytics and reporting. We catalogue and classify Library resources to ensure they are discoverable using effective metadata and system management. We also handle public access digitisation requests and are developing an ambitious project to digitise and preserve archived hardcopy parliamentary material. This will include assigning metadata to and cataloguing the digitised material to make it accessible.

Collection Management - responsible for the management of the Library’s hardcopy collections, on the parliamentary estate and in offsite storage. We own the Library’s Collection Development Policy, organise stock and make sure it is appropriately recorded and discoverable, retrieve and return material requested by users, manage conservation measures and respond to incidents that threaten the collections. We’re also responsible for storing and recording the Library’s digital collection of parliamentary papers. In recent years we’ve been very busy with large scale stock moves in preparation for Parliament’s Restoration & Renewal programme.

Find our work

Resources - from here you can get an idea of the scope of our services and discover how we make them available to our customers. The resources themselves are available only to users with a parliamentary login.