Service updates

Updates on services, resources, and support available to help you carry on with your work and research.

For further help or questions, please email reader.services@bodleian.ox.ac.uk or use our Live Chat service in the footer of this page.

Page last updated: 23 June 2025

Latest service changes

SOLO unavailable 12–13 July 2025

In order to carry out essential maintenance, SOLO will be temporarily unavailable between 6am on Saturday 12 July and around 6am Sunday 13 July.

During this time, you will not be able to search for items, request items from offsite storage or Scan and Deliver, or access online reading lists.

You will still be able to use your SSO to log in to e-resource subscriptions and use our archive and manuscript finding aids.

If you are visiting one of our open libraries that weekend and need help finding an item on the shelf or borrowing an item, please ask a member of staff. You can search our records and find location information in the JISC Library Hub.

We apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause. This maintenance will allow us to improve our services.

Library closures ahead of Humanities Library opening in late September 2025

The English Faculty Library, History of Medicine Library, Music Faculty Library, Oxford Internet Institute Library and Philosophy and Theology Faculties Library will close at 5pm on Friday 4 July. 

They will reopen as the new Humanities Library in late September 2025.

Find out more about access over the summer vacation and the new library.

Electronic legal deposit resources now available in reading rooms

After much work and collaboration with peers across UK Legal Deposit Libraries, we have restored access to the majority of existing legal deposit materials (published pre Oct 2023). UK non-print legal deposit books, scores and some journal articles are now accessible from reading room PCs.

The interim system works slightly differently from the previous method of accessing eLD on Reader PCs. 

For more information, visit our electronic legal deposit guide.

Specialist digital resources

At the end of 2024, we had to take a number of specialist digital resources offline. This was a precautionary step in line with University guidance to ensure we were protected from a hostile cyber-attack.

We acknowledge this had to happen faster than we would have liked and we were unable to give much advance notice to the affected scholars and communities who used the resources. We apologise for the disruption to your research.

For the resources that are currently unavailable we have been developing plans to either rebuild and replace the sites (which requires additional funding to be secured), or to incorporate the data into existing digital infrastructure, or in some cases to allow other organisations to take responsibility for hosting the data.

The following information shows how each of our resources are being managed through this transition.

Resources being redeveloped

The following sites are being rebuilt:

• Medieval Libraries of Great Britain
• London Book Trade (the redevelopment is being taken forward by the Bibliographical Society)

Resources where the content will be made available via existing systems

The material from the following sites will be incorporated into existing central catalogues. While this may mean that some of the original functionality is lost, it will make sure the content can be maintained and delivered in a resilient and sustainable manner long into the future. We will work to support users during this transition.

• Bodleian Chinese catalogues – Serica and Allegro
• Bodleian Broadside Ballads
• Bodleian Incunables (Bod-Inc)

Sites with content already available elsewhere

The information from these sites is already available elsewhere:

• Polonsky Foundation Digitization project
• British Book Trade Index

Sites whose future is still under discussion

• Bodleian John Johnson Catalogue of Printed Ephemera
• Italian Opera Aria on the London Stage 1705–1801
• London Stage Online
• Gough Map of Great Britain
• William Godwin Diary

Accessing content in the meantime

Our main digital platforms and services (such as SOLO, MARCO, ORA, Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts, Digital Bodleian, Scan and Deliver, and specialist manuscript catalogues) remain available. On each withdrawn resource, we have outlined where it is possible to access the data whilst the resource is unavailable.

Thank you for your patience and understanding

– Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian

Queen Victoria's Journals digital resource

This digital resource is no longer publicly available.

Staff and students at the University of Oxford can continue to access it through the University's ProQuest subscription, using their Single Sign On.

Bodleian Reader card holders can access the material via the same subscription on computers in our reading rooms.