1. Reading lists Sarah Roughley & David Clay NOWAL Exchange of Experience, University of Manchester, 28th February 2011

2. Motivations

3. Reading lists weren’t assumed to be a problem outside the library but …..

4. “Nothing kills student interest in reading lists as readily as the unavailability or insufficient availability of apparently key items”

5. “the university should work with the library to ensure there are sufficient number of books on subjects set in assignments”

6. “…..…… nearly a third of students began their search using Blackboard VLE.”

7. Pilot Project Four academic departments – History, Mathematical Sciences, Sociology and Social Policy, and the BVSc programme in Veterinary Sciences Three library assistants from our Academic Liaison team were each allocated a subject. Contacted every module leader to ask for a reading list, sending reminders where we didn’t get a response first time around

8. Recorded information on response rates, time taken to process etc

9. Mathematical Sciences – 51% History – 47% Sociology – 60% Veterinary Science – 57% Response rates

10. So far, we have received 130 reading lists from the four departments Of these, 70% of the recommended books were either not stocked by the library at all or there were not sufficient copies for student numbers.

11. We start with the library catalogue A 978 field is added to the bibliographic record of each item on a reading list

12. A brief record is created for journal articles including an Open URL link to the electronic version

13. Search for reading lists by module leader or code in the catalogue LMS exports reading lists via RSS

14. RSS feeds are in embedded in subject Libguides …. but can also be embedded in web pages

15. And added to Blackboard with a single click via a new add on developed by our computing staff

16. Using the LMS also allows us to generate usage statistics for items on the reading lists

17. Very long reading lists Problems with RSS feeds updating and lack of native support for RSS in Blackboard Academic staff can’t update reading lists Time taken to create journal article records in the catalogue Issues

18. The future Expand to more academic departments Improve the response rate Improve the look of reading lists in Blackboard Simplifying journal article record creation Make reading lists more accessible Our system(s) vs alternatives

19. Questions?