LIBRARY

LibraryWelcome to the Horniman Library in the CUE building. All members of the community are very welcome to use the Library for research purposes and to explore your personal interests. We are a small, specialist research facility, with five study desks for researchers use.

We operate an appointments system and we accept group bookings as well as individual researcher's appointments.

We welcome users with laptops. Please charge up the battery with enough power before coming to the library. You cannot plug into the CUE building electrical sockets.

We are members of the M25 Consortium of Academic Libraries. See their website for further details of member libraries: www.inform25.ac.uk

Visiting the Library

Our core opening hours are Monday - Friday 10.30 am - 5.30 pm

Please book your appointment in advance:

The Collections

The Horniman's extensive reference library holds nearly 30,000 titles on anthropology (world cultures), natural history and musical instruments.

These include specialist publications for researchers, university students, texts that can be used for teaching, and texts for children to help with homework.

To help you get the best use of our collections, we have bibliographies which accompany the Horniman museum temporary exhibitions in the galleries.

  • Natural history: includes the identification and ecology of plants and animals, conservation, evolution, gardening and garden design, aquatic life.
  • Musical instruments: western and non-western traditions.
  • Anthropology (world cultures): covers material culture: what sort of things people make and how they make them, architecture, art, anthropology and archaeology.

We subscribe to print journals and some online journals and have access to the online JSTOR research database. We also keep a range of recordings, photographs, videos and CD-ROMs.

Before your visit, search our collections via our new online catalogue. Link will take you to a new website

Further information on the Horniman Library & Archive