Here are some of the digital resources available via the library at CCCU. You will find information about study skills, e-books, recommended journals, databases and websites.
Welcome to our guide to library resources for Games Design students. As the Learning and Research Librarian for Creative Arts and Industries, I am here to support you in your learning and assignments.
Learning & Research Librarian for Creative Arts and Industries
The library purchases thousands of e-books which you can access both at home and on campus.
These are available via Library Search the university’s online digital discovery tool and you can access these using your university log in.
You can search for e-books either by author/title or by topic. Limit your results in the left-hand pane of the search screen to e-books and click on the link to CCCU e-book to download or read online.
You’ll find we have some amazing titles such as:
Journals are regular publications and include articles written by different authors on their specific research. These can be challenging to read; however, they are great for finding up-to-date information for your literature reviews and for learning about current developments in your field.
You can find journal articles online via LibrarySearch . Try searching for a key word or phrase connected with your research topic e.g. “games design” or “video game narrative”. See our LibrarySearch quick guide for more information.
There are also many journal articles freely available online. Here are some of the best-known games design journals.
Databases are collections of journal articles themed on particular subjects. The following will be useful for games design students.
You can find them via Library Search in the Find Databases A-Z section.
ACM Digital Library – Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) publications, including journals, conference proceedings, technical magazines, newsletters and books.
Box of Broadcasts - BoB is an online off-air TV and radio service provided by the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC) for UK higher and further education institutions. Anyone from CCCU can use BoB to watch programmes from the archive, create clips for embedding in Blackboard and search for forthcoming programmes to record by title or keyword. Box of Broadcasts guide.
Engineering Village – Search several engineering databases with multiple search options, with journals, standards, conference proceedings, and more.
Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive - Video Games (ProQuest) - This collection consists of the backfiles of more than 40 gaming magazines from the 1980s through to 2020. These titles cover a wide variety of consoles and platforms and aspects of the industry.
IEL Online (IEEE Xplore) – This database covers approximately one third of the world’s current literature on communications and computer science. It contains articles from IEEE Transactions on Games a journal which publishes original high-quality articles covering scientific, technical, and engineering aspects of games. You can also read and download conference papers from the International Conference on Virtual Worlds and Games for Serious Applications (VS-Games) and the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games, CIG.
JSTOR – A full-text archive of core scholarly journals, dating from the first issue up until two to five years ago. Subject coverage includes Arts and Sciences.
Kanopy - Access to a large, curated catalogue of over 30,000 educational documentaries and classic films from leading producers. Kanopy guide.
ScienceDirect - Searches across 2,500 peer-reviewed titles – or over 9.5 million articles. Useful for articles about mathematics, software, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence (AI), signal processing and forensic computing.
The university library has books on Game Design on the 1st and 3rd floors of Augustine House. Here are suggestions of classmarks (the numbers on the spines of the books) where you will find games design books:
To find a book, use LibrarySearch either by typing in words from a title or a topic. Once you have found a book, remember to check if it is available and if it is a 7-day loan or 4-week loan. This is important as the shorter loan books are on the open shelves in the middle of each floor and the 4 week loans are in the moving shelves.