Establishment and functions
The Library is one of the departments forming the Directorate of Information Services and is headed by a Director, who reports to the Chief Director, Information Services. The library was established in 1923, making it one of the oldest departments.
Mission
The department seeks to provide an all rounded quality library and information service that meets and exceeds our clients’ expectations. This is achieved through a well-coordinated, consultative selection and acquisition process and systematic dissemination of relevant information resources to the users of Parliament of Zimbabwe library.
Function
The main function of Parliament of Zimbabwe library is to contribute towards the management and timely delivery of valuable, reliable and relevant information services to Senators, Members of The National Assembly, Officers of Parliament and the public they represent.
Membership
Membership is open and free to Senators, Members of The National Assembly, Officers of Parliament and approved external users.
Location
Library relocation process from old to new parliament is still on-going and currently occupies the following rooms at the New Parliament Building in Mt Hampden
- 219 History Section
- 220,222-224 Offices
- 226 Library Cocktail
- 227 Statutory and Government Gazettes Collection
- 228 Contemporary Collection
Collection
- Books on political, economic and social issues including other subject specific disciplines
- Pamphlets, serial publications and bound material
- Parliamentary debates, reports and current serials.
- Parliamentary, legal and official material
- Court judgments, statutes, Zimbabwean Government Gazettes, Law reports, (e.g. Zimbabwe Law Reports and South African Law journals)
- Reports on parastatals and government departments
SPECIFIC LIBRARY SERVICES OFFERED
Loans/ Issuing of library materials
- MPs and Officers of Parliament are allowed to borrow two books at any one given time from the Main library for a period of 14 days
- Approved users from outside are not allowed to borrow books even from the main library but ca use the materials for reference only
- Reservation can be done for books out on loan through contacts with library staff.
Internet Facility
- The library provides free Internet services to MPs and other approved Researchers.
- Other officers of Parliament use the Library and Reference Services.
- Specialized reference and information services on all aspects of library and information services.
- The library is not self- sufficient in providing all required information. Materials not found in the library, but held by other libraries in the country can be accessible through interlibrary lending. Libraries that we cooperate with include USA Public Affairs Section, National Archives, UZ Library and many others.
Referral Service
- Users may be referred to other libraries for information or materials not available in the library.
Information literacy skills
- Use of the catalogue and other information retrieval tools.
- Information Communication Technologies i.e. open access and subscription based
- e-resources.
Membership
- Institutional Member of the Zimbabwe Library Association, APLESA and IFLA through APLESA
Hours of service
- The library operates from Monday to Friday between 08.30am and 16.30pm (exclusive of lunch hour)
- When Parliament is sitting the library will open until adjournment of the House.
- Contact exts 1097,1095, 1089, and 1096
E-RESOURCES COLLECTION
OPEN ACCESS LEGAL INFORMATION SITES
African legal Information
ZIMLII-Zimbabwe Legal Information Institute
Offers free, full and anonymous access to Zimbabwe case law Constitutional, High Court, Labour Court and Supreme Court judgements, legislation and legal books and journals.
Open Access to African Legal Information
https://laws.africa/open-african-law
Open Law Africa
African Legal Information Institute
elibrary POZ portal
EBOOKS COLLECTION (Interactive mode for index searching)
EJOURNALS COLLECTION (Interactive mode for index searching)
OTHER ERESOURCES
EBSCOHOST
- eBook Business
- Political Science Complete
- Permanent ebook collection
- Academic collection
- Socio-Index
AI RESEARCH TOOLS (as per page)
- 𝐒𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐲
- 𝐎𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫
- 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐭𝟐𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐬
- 𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐚 𝐁𝐨𝐭
- 𝐆𝐚𝐦𝐦𝐚
- 𝐓𝐞𝐱𝐭 𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐳𝐞
- 𝐌𝐢𝐫𝐨
- 𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐤𝐭𝐨𝐩𝐮𝐬
- 𝐍𝐮𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐀𝐈
- 𝐁𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡
- Scite
- CHATPDF
- Grammarly
- ResearchPal
EBOOKS COLLECTION
Bloomsbury Collections: https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/
Bloomsbury Collections renders customized access to quality research and provides libraries with a flexible way to build eBook collections across various subject disciplines.
Related subjects: Parliaments, Oversight, Legislation, Economics, Development, Budgets, Thematic areas
Bookbon: Multi-disciplinary electronic books. Related Subjects: Legislation, Thematic areas, Representation, Development
DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books provides free access to books to read. All books listed in DOAB are free to read and share for non-commercial use.
Related Subjects: Thematic Areas, Legislation, Oversight, Research and Statistics, Development studies,
Free Book Centre: Contains links to thousands of free online technical books.
Related subjects: Thematic Areas, Legislation, Oversight, Research and Statistics, Development studies,
Google-books: Provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across various disciplines, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Books helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.
Google Scholar: Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.
Related Subjects: Parliamentarism, Bicameral System, African Parliaments, Gender, Committees, National Budgets
Intech Open: InTech is a pioneer and world’s largest multidisciplinary open access publisher of books covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine.
Related Subjects: Business, Management and Economics
OAPEN: OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality-controlled collection of open access books, and provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation.
Open Research Library: The Open Research Library (ORL) is planned to include all Open Access book content worldwide on one platform for user-friendly discovery, offering a seamless experience navigating more than 14,000 Open Access books. This vital infrastructure is slated to comprise the most comprehensive collection of peer-reviewed Open Access books accessible for everyone.
Related subjects: Law, legislation, Peace and Stability, Development, Management
OpenStax: Peer-reviewed, openly licensed, 100% free, and backed by additional learning resources. Review OpenStax textbooks and decide if they are right for your course. Simple to adopt, free to use. We make it easy to improve student access to higher education.
Related subjects: Law, Business Management, Entrepreneurship, Accounting, Economics
Open Textbook Library
Transform higher education and student learning with Open textbooks which are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Download, edit and distribute them at no cost.
Related subjects: Entrepreneurship, Accounting, Finance, Human Resources Management, Marketing, Thematic areas
Project Gutenberg: Free e-book collection covering wide subject areas.
Related Subjects: Thematic areas, Political Science, Economics, Budgeting, Research
Scientific Research: Scientific Research is an academic publisher of open access journals. It also publishes academic books and conference proceedings. SCIRP currently has more than 200 open access journals in the areas of science, technology and medicine.
Related Subjects: Budget Analysis, Reports, Data Analysis, Law
Textbooks & Solutions: A multidisciplinary general-purpose open-access repository of textbooks.
Related subjects: Geomatics, Surveying, Environmental science, Geology, Minerals, Mining, Metallurgy, Agriculture, Plant & Crop science, Animal science, Ecology, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Accounting & Finance, Marketing, Auditing & Taxation
Z-Library: A multidisciplinary general-purpose open-access repository.
Related subjects: Thematic areas, Law, Oversight, Representation, Strategic Management
ELECTRONIC JOURNALS COLLECTION
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
OPEN DOAR: OpenDOAR is the quality-assured, global Directory of Open Access Repositories. OpenDOAR consists of repositories that provide free, open access to academic outputs and resources. You can search and browse through thousands of registered repositories based on a range of features, such as location, software or type of material held.
Related subjects: Arts, Engineering, Health and Medicine, Humanities, Mathematics, Science, Social Sciences and Technology
CORE: Offers seamless access to millions of open access research papers, enrich the collected data for text-mining and provide unique services to the research community. Covers the fields of Mining, Engineering, Mathematics, Physical sciences, and Information Technology. Core.ac.uk
COGENT (Taylor &Francis): Cogent OA is a Taylor & Francis Group open access publisher of scholarly research and multidisciplinary series of broad-scope open access journals, helping researchers share their ideas and discoveries as widely and effectively as possible. The Cogent OA journals are run by prestigious editorial boards with a strong focus on constructive peer review, rapid publication, and the universal dissemination of authors’ work. Focused towards publishing all research that is sound and valid, including negative research and replication studies.
Related Subjects: Business Management, Economics & Finance, Engineering, Food and Agriculture, Mathematics & Statistics, Development Studies, Environment & Sustainability, Disaster Management, Risk Management
Tandfonline.com/ openaccess / cogentoa
ECONBIZ: Journals, Working Papers & Conferences in Business Studies and Economics.
Related subjects: Risk Management, Business Law, Public Funds Management, Business Management, Finance, Economics, Entrepreneurship, Research and Information Literacy
ECONPAPERS
EconPapers provides access to the world’s largest collection of online Economics working papers, journal articles and software.
Related subjects: Economics, Business management, Budgets, Marketing, Accounting & Finance, Human Resource Management
ELDIS: Eldis supports free and open access to useful and relevant research on global development.
Related Subjects: Agriculture, Climate change, Environmental sciences, Conflict and security.
ELSERVIER: Eldis supports free and open access to useful and relevant research on global development.
Related Subjects: Agriculture, Climate change, Environmental sciences, Conflict and security
EMERALD OPEN ACCESS: Emerald is a leading English language publisher of academic and professional literature covering wide range of subjects and full text articles.
Related Subjects: Accounting, Finance and Economics, Business, Management and Strategy, Marketing, Climate Change and the Environment, Education and Research Methods,
PDFDRIVE.COM: https://www.pdfdrive.com/
PDF Drive is a search engine for PDF files of eBooks to download for free without download limits.
Related subjects – Parliaments, Parliamentarism, Thematic areas, Development, Budget Frameworks, Developing Countries, Statutory Bills and Laws, Democracy
POLITICS AND GOVERNANCE: Open Access Journal ISSN:2183-2463
RESEARCH AND POLITICS: Journals.sagepub.com
RESEARCH4LIFE: The Research for Life Portal brings to you journals and e-books published by some of the world’s reputable publishers. The portal provides access to all subjects and disciplines such as Social Sciences, Law, Arts and Humanities, Medicine, Commerce and Physical Sciences. https://www.research4life.org/
WILEY OPEN ACCESS: Wiley Open Access journals are supported by a network of authoritative journals and societies as well as internationally renowned editorial board members. All research articles published in Wiley Open Access journals are immediately freely available to read, download and share. Wiley Open Access publishes a number of online journals across biological, chemical and health sciences.
Related Subjects: Ecology, Development, Business, Economics, Finance & Accounting,
SCIENDO: Sciendo provides multidisciplinary journals, books, conference proceedings and a variety of other publications for academics and professionals. They publish new content and retrospective journal volumes and previously published books. https://sciendo.com/
UNESCO DIGITAL LIBRARY: This platform renders access to publications, documents and other materials either produced by UNESCO or pertaining to UNESCO’s fields of competence. These collections are accessible online or physically – in the library and archives reading room.
Related Subjects: Water resources management, Sustainable development, Climate change, Educational policy
SCIENTIFIC & ACADEMIC PUBLISHING: http://www.sapub.org/Journal/aboutus.aspx
Scientific & Academic Publishing (SAP) is an Open-Access publisher of journals covering a wide range of academic disciplines. SAP serves the world’s research and scholarly communities, and aims to be one of the largest publishers for professional and scholarly societies.
SPRINGER OPEN: https://www.springeropen.com/journals-a-z
Various open access journals provided for by Springer in various subject areas.
Related Subjects: Business & Management, Parliaments, Parliamentarism, History, Oversight, Representation, Laws, Statutes.
AI RESEARCH TOOLS
- 𝐒𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐲: Extract and summarizes key information from a research paper. Link: https://www.scholarcy.com/
- 𝐎𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫: You can just speak and record your research idea. Otter will save and transcribe it for you. Link: https://otter.ai/
- 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐭𝟐𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐬: Upload your data in csv format, instruct chatgpt to analyze and visualize. Link: https://2stats.chat/
- 𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐚 𝐁𝐨𝐭: You can automate formula generation and data analysis in MS Excel with Formula Bot. Link: https://formulabot.com/
- 𝐆𝐚𝐦𝐦𝐚: You can use it for making research presentations. Link: https://gamma.app/
- 𝐓𝐞𝐱𝐭 𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐳𝐞: It will help you in writing, eliminating repetitive tasks, and mistakes. Link: https://lnkd.in/gQHCazg
- 𝐌𝐢𝐫𝐨: Miro will help you in idea brainstorming, organizing research ideas, and creating interactive presentations. Link: https://miro.com/
- 𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐤𝐭𝐨𝐩𝐮𝐬: It offers templates, visual elements, and customization options to help researchers create impactful presentations effortlessly.
- 𝐍𝐮𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐀𝐈: It can help you to write formulas in Excel and clean data. Link: https://numerous.ai/
- 𝐁𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡: It’s an AI tool designed to supercharge your digital experience
- Scite: Is a scientific tool that is revolutionizing how scientific articles are discovered and evaluated. With a combination of more than 1.2 billion citation statements and 187 million articles, Scite efficiently provides supporting or contrasting evidence for cited claims. Scite is an internationally acclaimed platform and is trusted by leading corporations, universities, and publishers for its ability to streamline research. https://scite.ai/
- Research Rabbit: Is a citation-based literature mapping tool that offers a streamlined approach to academic research. Researchers, students, and professionals alike can use this tool to enhance their efficiency of research.
- Elicit: This research tool is specifically designed to analyze academic papers at superhuman speed. With the capability of sifting through 125 million academic papers from the Semantic Scholar corpus, elicit provides researchers with tools that can identify themes and concepts across multiple papers.
- ChatPDF: A unique innovation in the field of academic and professional research that facilitates interaction with PDF files. Employing advanced artificial intelligence systems, it successfully translates the daunting task of extracting critical information from expansive documents into an engaging dialogue. Users can freely upload multiple documents and engage with them simultaneously, ask questions in any language, and receive cited sources for all derived content from the platform.