Online Study Tool Kit

Spotlight On: Project Muse

Project Muse is one of the many databases the Library subscribes to that you can access free from anywhere with your Roehampton login -  find it on our A-Z List of Databases and relevant UR Library subject resources guides. It provides access to hundreds of up-to-date e-books, journal articles and reviews in the humanities and social sciences, especially Literature, History, Film, Performing Arts, Philosophy, Religions and Social and Political Sciences.

Project Muse is a reliable source of high-quality, peer-reviewed, authoritative content, published from some 400 of the world's most distinguished university presses and scholarly societies. You can find some handy subject guides on Project Muse listing the top book publishers and journal titles by subject area.

Because all of the content is fully discoverable on the UR Library search platform, you don't need to go directly to Project Muse to access it, but searching directly on databases such as Project Muse does produce more refined results. So for more in-depth research, for instance at dissertation or postgraduate level, you may find the following tips helpful.

How do I perform a basic search?

You can perform a basic search using the Search box found at the top of the page.

You will need to filter your results to Only content that I have access on the left-hand side, as there are some resources that are not included in our subscription.

Filtering by Content type (books, journals) and Research Area will help narrow your results down if you have too many.

For more information on how to search Project Muse see the how to do a search on Project Muse video.

The collection contains over 5,000 e-books and 200 journals. Functionality matches most online resources: each e-book is clearly divided into chapter-by-chapter sections, which, like journal articles, can be printed, downloaded as PDFs or saved to a MyMuse account, which is free to create (see below). 

MyMuse account

You can access Project Muse freely with your Roehampton login, but you can also set up a personal account at no extra cost to get enhanced features such as: 

• setting up alerts to let you know when Project MUSE publishes new articles from your favourite titles or in your research area;
• save books or articles in one place;
• Cite Library Items - send citations from your saved items to Refworks.

For more information on MyMuse see the creating a MyMuse account video.

Whilst writing this post I came across an article in Project Muse Forgetting Fiction: An Oral History of Reading written by a former University of Roehampton academic, Shelley Trower. It's always interesting to find articles by staff and to discover their research interests, in this case, how reading shapes our lives.

The article concerns a project Memories of Fiction: An Oral History, which was designed to explore what people remember about fiction they have read. The project found that what they usually remembered more than the texts themselves was the experience of reading and the context in which books are read: the enjoyment of reading, on a bus or in a library, with a parent or on one's own. This particular response resonated with me:

"When I was thinking back to things I'd read, it's not so much remembering the book—I will often have quite vague memories of the book—except that I liked it—but it's really linked with what you were doing and where you were and how you were feeling, and I think it's because I had such positive memories of enjoying the experience of reading, rather than the actual books, that has made me love reading all my life. I think, I really think that's what it's about, because if you asked me for details of any of these books I might be a bit hazy, but ask me where I was or what I was doing or how I felt, and I can tell you a lot more." (Trower, 2020).

More information about the project can be found on the project website, www.memoriesoffiction.org. The oral history interviews are all available in the University Archives and can be accessed upon request. 

If you want some fiction to read at leisure during the winter break, the Library has a large collection of literature on the 3rd floor and also in the Leisure Collection in the Library Cafe and online ebooks and audiobooks too.

Reference: Trower, Shelley. "Forgetting Fiction: An Oral History of Reading: (Centred on Interviews in South London, 2014–15)." Book History, vol. 23, 2020, p. 269-298. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/bh.2020.0007.