The entrance to the University Library is barrier-free.

Parking spaces for wheelchair users are located at the side entrance, Ihnestraße 28.

The elevator is also close to the side entrance.

There are special toilets suitable for wheelchair on the 2nd and 3rd floor (1. OG / 2. OG). The keys are available at the Information center or the Reading Room reception.

The Freie Universität Berlin libraries share a blog called Biblioblog.

Biblioblog covers important dates, library themes in general and – very important for staying up tp date – newly licensed databases and databases in testing.

URL: http://blogs.fu-berlin.de/bibliotheken/

There are several Canteens and Cafeterias operated by the studierendenWERK within walking distance as well as a French bakery at the intersection of Ihne- and Garystraße.

Additional machines for snacks and drinks are located in the Henry Ford Building next door.

As of 2017, the student cards will be replaced by the Campuscard.

On the first floor of the University Library, an output machine for creating the Campuscard and a second device for validation are set up. The validation has to be done every semester.

Freie Universität has compiled an overview of the locations of Campuscard machines. Here are the times when the devices are accessible and when there are caregivers to help with the creation and validation.

In the UB a supervisor is available Mon-Fri from 12:00-14:00.

The library portal Primo covers the literature held by the Freie Universität Berlin libraries. Furthermore, it contains a mega-index of academic literature – especially articles, mostly available as full texts.

Within the Primo interface, please select either the "Primo" search space (with mega-index) or the "FU Catalog" searchspace (without mega-index).

Details for print media in the FU Library System provided through the library portal Primo include library location, call number, loan conditions and availability for every item in the FU libraries. Loan renewals can be made in the user account in Primo by yourself.

In order to request and take out items, users need a valid user card. Lending modalities are laid out in the Library Regulations.

More details are to be found on the Circulation Services page.

The circulation desk is responsible for all services related to lending operations. This includes, among other things, the issuing of user cards, lending, returning, extending loan periods and user cards and handling difficult cases concerning this area. Further information can be found here.

Citation-management software can be very useful for your academic writing.

The University Library and the University's central computing services, ZEDAT, jointly provide campus licenses for two state-of-the-art citation managers: Citavi and EndNote.

The University Library (UB) und the University's central computing services, ZEDAT, jointly offer a program to enhance IT competence, subject literacy and general study skills.

Individual appointments can be made for Coachings that provide assistance in literature search and retrieval for assignments or theses.

Freie Universität Berlin students enrolled in bachelor’s degree programs can earn credits in the Information and Media Skills module within the General professional skills program.

Coats, jackets and bags are not allowed in the Reading Room and the open stacks.

Belongings can be deposited at the coat check in the entrance hall and in the lockers in the Information Center area on 2nd floor (1. OG) and outside the Reading Room on 3rd floor (2. OG).

More information on the coat check page.

The University Library provides working spaces with and without computers.

For more information please go to the Working Spaces page.

As a rule, the Information center is the first address for questions of all types.

You can also turn directly to staff in all library functions or to the subject librarians.

Fees apply for copy services. They are mainly delivered by a specialized company, RICOH.

Freie Universität Berlin provides a large selection of databases for the users of its libraries (see: Terms of use for electronic resources).

Library users can order scans by completing a form on the library portal Primo.

For the time being, digitization is limited to such books as are excluded from self-copying and self-scanning (protected holdings, Reading Room holdings, rare materials, delicate and damaged books).

In other words: This is not an article ordering service

This Reprographics form should be used to order scans or copies of items exluded from self-copying (protected holdings, interlibrary loans); it can handed in at the Reading Room desk.

Please refer to the form for information about fees.

Email contact: digital@ub.fu-berlin.de

The number of electronic Media licensed by Freie Universität Berlin – e-books, e-journals and databases – is increasing.

Guests also have access to electronic media in the Freie Universität Berlin libraries.

Citation-management software can be very useful for your academic writing.

The University Library and the University's central computing services, ZEDAT, jointly provide campus licenses for two state-of-the-art citation managers: EndNote und Citavi.

The University Library also offers introductions to citation managers (see Learning).

The Freie Universität Berlin libraries are open to the public free of charge.

Fees and fines may apply for services such as interlibrary loans or, for example, when loans are overdue.

The University Library provides six group study rooms with different equipment (smart boards, Internet-connected television set).

Reservations can be made through an online room-booking system.

The University Library offers Introductions to literature search in combination with a tour of the Library.

The Virtual Tour is currently being revised.

The Information Center is the Library System's central information desk for all sorts of questions concerning literature.

The Information center can refer you to specialists within the University Library or to the Information Desks in the department libraries when applicable.

The University Library of Freie Universität Berlin is now represented on Instagram.

Through interlibrary loan the University Library can procure items or article copies for registered users from other libraries in Berlin, Germany and abroad. Fees may apply.

This service requires a valid FU student card or an FU library card.

Information literacy is important in the Digital Age.

Library tours and introductions can be useful in getting acquainted with the Freie Universität Berlin libraries and their spectrum of services. The University Library's course program also covers techniques of literature search and citation management software.

For Freie Universität Berlin students the student card is concurrently the user card for the FU libraries.

External users can obtain library cards at the circulation desks at no charge.

Cards are valid throughout Freie Universität including Charité. They must be renewed from time to time.

The library portal Primo is a „one-stop“ solution for finding and accessing local and external resources, such as books and journal articles, both in print and electronic format.

URL: http://primo.fu-berlin.de

The regular loan period for University Library holdings is four weeks. For more details please go to the Circulation page.

The Freie Universität Berlin University Library is located in the south of Berlin in the district of Dahlem. This is the street address:

Garystr. 39
14195 Berlin-Dahlem

Location in   GoogleMaps.

Public transport:
U-Bahn: Take line 3 to Freie Universität (former Thielplatz) or to Oskar-Helene-Heim
Bus: Take line 110 to Bitscher Str. or to Oskar-Helene-Heim, Expressbus: X10 to Oskar-Helene-Heim  

Find public-transport connection through

Freie Universität Berlin Students
Students of Freie Universität Berlin log in to the library portal Primo and the library computers with their zedat-account. FU students can change their password, home address and redirect to preferred e-mail addresses themselves in the ZEDAT portal.

External Users
For logging in, the library card number serves as user number (Benutzernummer). The inital Password, as a  rule, is your date of birth (format ddmmyy), the 1st letter of your surname and an exclamation mark. 

External users with an officially confirmed living address in Berlin or Brandenburg can take media out on loan.

Would you like to know what Freie Universität and Charité libraries have been buying lately?

Go to the New Acquisitions page , where you can look up books that have been acquired by Freie Universität libraries and Charité during the last 14 days.

The old subject catalog can be useful as an extra tool besides the library portal Primo in order to search for not-so-current publications by subject. This catalog database makes it possible to search the University Library's holdings up to publication year 1989 by subject headings.

The database is an electronic equivalent of the former card catalog. It consists of digital facsimiles of the catalog cards and an alphabetical index of headings. Die Ordnung der digitalen Katalogkarten entspricht der des Kartenkataloges.

URL: http://amun.ub.fu-berlin.de/aswk/regsearch.php

When searching for literature by subject, please use the library portal Primo first. In many cases, datasets in Primo for literature published before 1990 also contain subject metadata because datasets are continuously updated through library collaboration.

Approximately 200,000 of the books acquired during the last 30 years are shelved in the open stacks area. You can retrieve these yourself and take them to the circulation desk  to have them checked out.

In the open stacks books are not shelved by classification. Therefore, the open stacks are not useful when you intend to browse literature by subject area. You will want to go to the open stacks when you have found a book listed in the catalog and want to retrieve that book yourself; you will find it according to its shelf number as specified in the catalog.

Mon-Fri 9.00–20.00

(Reading Room: 9.00–18.00)

In order to log in to the library portal Primo, you will need your user number, or student number, and a password (see: Login, User Account).

The password initially received should be replaced by an individual password. The password change has to be done in the FU-OPAC user account.

Should you have forgotten your password or should there be a problem with the automatically generated password for Freie Universität Berlin students, you can turn to the Circulation Desk for a new password – which you will only receive on presentation of an official document of identification.

"Permalink" is a portmanteau word made up of "permanent" and "hyperlink." A permalink URL is stable, as opposed to potentially unstable URLs in a browser address bar, which may contain such elements as session IDs, which lead to the address becoming invalid after a while. Find more information about how to use permalinks in Primo.

The Communications Team of the University Library is responsible for the public relations work of the libraries and oversees the social media channels.

The Publishers' Bindings Database (VerlagsEinbandDatenbank, VED) is a model, sketch, or proposition for a publishers' bindings database covering the German-language territory, i. e., a database listing the book covers which were produced by machine or by industrial processes between 1850 and around 1930.

The VED was set up as a retirement project at Freie Universität Berlin University Library by Doris Fouquet-Plümacher; it has been online since 2008. The final version (May 2013) covers 700 publishers' bindings corresponding to 935 books, predominantly from the University Library's holdings; the Kleist editions, however, that are  documented in the database belong mainly to Kleist-Museum at Frankfurt on the Oder.

As concerns the VED's structure, bindings and books are stored in separate datasets and arranged in record sets for perspicuity. Every binding record contains a picture of the cover and one of the endpaper (not, however, if it is monochrome). Every binding record has at least one book record linked to it and – in cases where the same binding was used for more than one edition – more than one book record. Search parameters are publisher, author, title, bookbindery, artist, style, motif, material, etc.

http://amun.ub.fu-berlin.de/ved/informationen

Is there a book, a journal, a database that you think the University Library or one of the department libraries should consider acquiring?

Although we may not be able to fulfill every request, we appreciate your suggestions.

The University Library's Reading Room provides sources for all academic subjects, but with emphasis on Humanities and Social Sciences. Here you will find printed reference materials that are excluded from loan.

The Reading Room is an area suitable for quiet study with some 200 working spaces – with and without computers.

The Freie Universität Berlin is a signatory of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities and is a cooperating institution for Informationsplattform Open Access.

The University Library runs Refubium - Freie Universität Berlin Repository where open-access documents can be stored on.

Find more information on the Library Systems open-access pages.

The KOBV is the Berlin-Brandenburg library network. On the KOBV portal you can find out which libraries in the region have a book you may be looking for.

Since the KOBV is the instituion through which interlibrary loans are processed, you can place your orders for inter library loan on the KOBV portal.

According to a definition by the Alliance of German Science Organizations, research data are data "that arise in the course of scientific projects, for example, through digitization, source research, experiments, measurements, studies or surveys."

To support Freie Universität researchers in the management of research data, Freie Universität Berlin offers various services and consulting options. A central service of Freie Universität Berlin for research data is Refubium, the institutional repository on which University members can publish their research data.

... English pages in progress!

• About reseach data - German only
• Services - German only
• About Refubium - German only

Teachers can select important sources for their courses; these titles will then be temporarily excluded from loan and placed in the Reading Room to maximize availability for course participants.

Returning Freie Universität library holdings is possible at all circulation desks in the Library system. Interlibrary loans have to be returned at the University Library always.

Outside the University Library's opening hours, items can be returned to the book drops next to the University Library's entrance (Garystr. 39).

School students can use the University Library if they are at least age 16.

Adolescents (16 to 18 years of age) will receive a special form to apply for a usercard that has to be signed by their legal guardian.

To the University Library With Your School Class?

Teachers can make appointments for classes or (honors) courses to be introduced to using the Library and to searching literature. Please contact the Information Center.

Online Tutorial

Are you a school student in Berlin or Brandenburg and do you need to write an assignment, give a report or prepare a fifth examination component? – Then this is for you.

  Information-literacy tutorial for school students (German)

The academic librarians at the Freie Universität Berlin University Library can be contacted about subject-related questions.

The University Library provides a large selection of licensed databases, databases in testing, e-journals, and e-books for the Freie Universität Berlin members and for the users of its libraries. Because of the terms of the licenses access is restricted to devices within the Freie Universität Berlin network.

Freie Universität Berlin members can configurate remote access (see: Terms of use for electronic resources).

The University Library's Undergraduate Text Book Collection (Lehrbuchsammlung, LBS) provides multiple copies of both introductory text books and basic literature in a wider sense as well as highly demanded literature from these fields:

• Law
• Language and Literature
• Social Sciences

The Theses Department (Hochschulschriftenstelle) collects the copies of doctoral theses written at Freie Universität Berlin that candidates are required to submit according to the regulations concerning doctoral graduation.

The Theses Department also assists doctoral candidates in dealing with the regulations concerning the submission of theses in electronic format.

The University Bibliography lists the publications authored by Freie Universität Berlin members.

There is a special system in place for the self-recording of publications (Selbsterfassung der Publikationen für Angehörige der Freien Universität Berlin, SEP).

The University Library runs a document server for University members to store publications on and, on a separate server instance, a repository specifically for doctoral theses.

User accounts in the library portal Primo show items ordered, items ready for pickup, and reserved items. Fees or fines, if applicable (as for over-due loans), and interlibrary loans ordered and delivered are also indicated.

In order to access your user account or to request items, reserve items, or extend loan periods, you need to log in.

Source: Anmelden, Benutzerkonto

The Freie Universität Berlin Library System – coordinated by the University Library – trains both Fachangestellte für Medien- und Informationsdienste for archives and libraries and academic librarians.

Internships are available for trainees and students in specific programs.

Freie Universität members as well as members of all other eduroam-participating institutions can log in to the Freie Universität university network using "eduroam" functionality and use the Internet.

The University Library has created a series of tutorials that it publishes on its own YouTube channel.

URL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnuZv3YZ_JR3YvJkCgTY4YA