I am very pleased to report that ReadingLists@UCL has reached its target for July 2017: 65% of taught courses at UCL now have an online reading list.

The target was set in the UCL Library Services Strategy to have 65% coverage by the end of July 2017. 65% equates to more than 3,000 reading lists, and forty-one departments have met, or exceeded 65% coverage. To show how far we have come, the first measurement of the new system in October 2014 showed a baseline of around 29% coverage.

Librarians, administrators and academics have worked hard to embrace the online reading lists, with the aim of providing excellent quality guidance and resources to students. With a wealth of e-resources available to us at UCL, many essential texts link to full-text readings, or are digitised using our CLA licence.

Here are some figures. Between 1st September 2016 and 31st July:

• there were more than 460,000 visitors
• the top visited reading list was ‘ANTH1001 Introduction to material and visual culture’ with 5425 page views
• total visits each month have been consistently higher than in the same period last year
• the busiest month was October 2016 with more than 70,000 visits
• … and around two-thirds of these were returning visitors, demonstrating that students return to lists rather than look just once.

You can read more about online reading lists on our webpages and in our ReadingLists@UCL blog.  And of course do get in touch if you would like to know more!

This way!

Wednesday afternoon drop-ins at the TLS office in Senate House continue each Wednesday, despite the building work in UCL Senate House Hub.

Pam or Hazel will be available from 2.30 – 4.30 pm each Wednesday to:

• Walk you through getting started
• Set up new reading lists with you
• Troubleshooting any issues, such as links to Moodle not working
• A quick refresher if you haven’t used the lists in a while
• A quiet seat to get away from your email and telephone, and organise your readings!

If you would like to drop by, give us a call on 020 3549 5729 (internal x65729), and we will meet you in reception to guide you to the TLS office! Or get in touch to arrange us to visit you in your office.

Cones–Endless cones by Rusty Clark

On Monday August 14th 9am – 3pm there will be some disruption to ReadingLists@UCL.

This is the final step in an ISD datacentre migration.  The project is to move the server of the Library Management System, which powers UCL’s Explore catalogue. This will mean a necessary outage of the library catalogue.

Read more information on the Aleph server move and how it affects all UCL Library services.

This affects online reading lists in two ways:

• For students: existing readings won’t have their live ‘Availability’ on display: you won’t be able to see whether books are on the shelf or out on loan.  The shelfmark, however will remain on display.
• For UCL staff: you won’t be able to bookmark new readings from Explore.

Bookmarking from e-resources such as e-journal articles and e-books will be unaffected.

The TLS team are here as ever to help and answer questions, so don’t hesitate to get in touch.

The ISD server migration work is complete and ReadingLists@UCL has returned to full function.  Thank you for your patience during this time.

You can now bookmark books from the library catalogue, Explore, as usual.  Readings on your lists will display the library shelfmark and how many copies are on the shelf, as usual.

The TLS team will run a report of all readings bookmarked in the past three days to check they are linking to the catalogue correctly.

If you have any queries about your reading lists, please get in touch with us!