Reading lists

Sarah Roughley & David Clay

NOWAL Exchange of Experience,

University of Manchester,

28th February 2011

Motivations

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

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

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

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

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

Recorded information on response rates, time taken to process etc

Mathematical Sciences – 51%

History – 47%

Sociology – 60%

Veterinary Science – 57%

Response rates

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.

A 978 field is added to the bibliographic record of each item on a reading list

We start with the library catalogue

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

Search for reading lists by module leader or code in the catalogue

LMS exports reading lists via RSS

RSS feeds are in embedded in subject Libguides ….

but can also be embedded in web pages

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

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

Mathematical Sciences

Sociology and Social Policy

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

Mean number of items

Mean number of items

Mathematics Sociology and Social Policy

0

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

6000

Number of items where checkout = 0

Total number of items on reading lists

Mathematical Sciences

Sociology and Social Policy

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

Median number of items

Median number of items

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

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

The future

Questions?