ABSTRACT
The provision of working space for research students within a department can be important not only in its primary function of meeting their need for somewhere to work, but also to break down their intellectual isolation. As well as providing working space for many research students, university libraries are an essential tool for their research. The problem of providing an adequate library service for them differs substantially from that of providing for undergraduates, who need multiple copies of a few books, but generally need relatively few works in any field. The students’ own comments give a vivid impression of their difficulties and also of the way in which the type of difficulty shifts from overall frustration to more detailed problems as the library improves. Many students in both pure and applied science spend a substantial part of their period as a research student designing, constructing, and modifying the apparatus which they intend to use for their experiments.
