The University of Papua New Guinea Library comprises of the Michael Somare Library located at the Waigani campus and the Medical Library at the Taurama campus.
The Michael Somare Library currently holds all physical resources such as text books, videos, journals and publications for the School of Natural and Physical Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences. In addition, it holds resources for the School of Business and Public Policy and Law in its collection.
The Medical Library holds all physical resources for the Medical School, and operates at full capacity. Manpower and resources are coordinated and managed by the Medical Librarian in consultation with the University Librarian on key aspects of administration in human resources and funding.
We also recently witnessed the establishment of the Business and Public Policy Library at the Waigani campus and are currently working towards establishing the Law Library to be located in the new Law School building.
The concept of having a separate “satellite” libraries established at each school or Faculty is for convenience in accessing content specific to their major field of studies; with the Michael Somare Library being the principal library responsible for the management and administration of staffing, resources and collection development.
Our Resources
The Library is comprised of the New Guinea Collection, Periodicals (Journals), the Reader Services, the Law Collection, Acquisition and Cataloguing. Our holdings comprises of resources in all major disciplines and its catalogued holdings is accessible via OPAC (Online Public Access Catalogue). Catalogued data comprises of all resources held in the Michael Somare Library, the Medical Library, the Law Library and the Business and Public Policy Library.
To supplement our hard copy collection, the University Library has acquired access to various products available in electronic/digital formats available over the Internet. These resources are available to students and staff of both campuses and comprises of a rich mixture of premium, subscription-only content as EBSCO, ProQuest, PAMBU (Pacific Manuscripts Bureau – ANU); as well as fully-subsidised access content from JSTOR, HINARI, AGORA and Research 4 Life, available to educational institutions by various international donor agencies in line with the UN development goals.
Our digital platform gives our users access to well over 4 million unique and current resources in various formats – full text, citations, serials and journals, transcribed videos as well as borrowable eBooks – electronic books which can be borrowed and read offline for up to 7 days at a time. Additionally, EBSCO, ProQuest and JSTOR allows users to reference material using any of the internationally recognised referencing standards used in academia.
Other value-added services includes an android and IOS (Apple) APP to access our Library Catalogue from any handheld device, borrower alerts and requests through email, as well as online and external access to Current Lecture notes and Past Exams which the library currently hosts on its eLibrary platform. Our users are able to access these material anywhere in the world using a current UPNG email address and password.
Our Digital Platform together with our Library OPAC (Online Public Access Catalogue) is currently accessible via the Internet through our OPAC page https://upng.softlinkhosting.com.au. From 2020 onwards we plan to roll out these services to our external users at all Open Campuses.
Our Library staff will be conducting scheduled trainings and tours and in the use of our digital platforms and our other resources and services. These targeted soft skills trainings are to assist our users to fully utilise our content in their research and are aimed at giving the University full value for money on our subscription services.