The ReadingLists@UCL team continues to work closely with Library and central UCL Accessibility teams to harmonise our services for students and staff. We have now drawn together and formalised our offering.

In addition to our ReadingLists@UCL Guide ‘Supporting Print Disabled Students’ aimed at teaching staff, we have recently offered a permanent ‘Moodle Healthcheck’.  Previously limited to summer projects, we now support teaching staff year round to review a Moodle course – sometimes inherited and in need of a review – to identify which course readings are not accessible, and help address this.

This spring we joined with an Arts and Humanities faculty project, along with Learning Technologists and other librarians, and helped reviewed six Moodle modules.  The Learning Technologists led on accessible documents (handbooks, PowerPoints etc.) and we identified course readings that were inaccessible.  We either added a compliant version of the reading to an online reading list, or helped OCR and update the document to make it more accessible within Moodle.  On reading lists we link to UCL subscribed resources where possible, to ensure readings are also copyright compliant.

The Exam Papers service and course readings digitised under the CLA licence, all adhere to a baseline standard of accessibility so they are screen readable as standard.

Did you know that you can utilise other resources types to enrich the metadata on your online reading list ?

Talis (the reading list software provider) have enabled four new resource types : Database, Newspaper, Object and Report. Here is how you can use them –

Bookmark the item as usual, and if you need to change the resource type, click on the drop down under resource type –

Resource type drop down arrow

Once you click the drop down arrow, you can then see the new options :

New Talis resource types

Select the resource type you want, and continue to bookmark as usual.

In addition to the new resource types, there are also 6 new additional metadata fields which you can add to bookmarks. These are:

• Format
• Number
• Identifier
• Series
• Location
• Court

Additional fields options

If you feel there is a resource type or additional field that you would like added as options, please let us know and we will raise this with Talis.

New year greetings from the ReadingLists@UCL team! Three things to get us back in the swing of term.

1. Applications are open again for Student Curriculum Partners nominations [link edited when applications closed, to direct to an information page].  This is a wonderful scheme pairing students with modules, to review them through the lens of inclusivity.  The academic receives recommendations on their module, and an insight into how students view their curriculum.  A key aim of the project is to reduce awarding gaps for marginalised student groups at UCL.  As an academic all you need to do is nominate your module to initiate the process. Did you know you can use your online reading list as a starting point to examining the diversity in a module?  Take this further with our ReadingLists@UCL’s Guide, Liberating the Curriculum page.
2. During Disability History month 2024 the UCL Community contributed book suggestions on the national theme ‘Disability, livelihood and employment’. Read more in the UCL article ‘Disability History Month 2024’.  The call out is from the Library Liberating the Collections group, and if you wish to find the recommended books in UCL Libraries then online reading lists are created for all the History and Celebration months.
3. Finally, our ReadingLists@UCL Guide for academic and support staff has had a significant update, with additional resources.  Do take a look for support in linking your list to Moodle, getting started and more.  You can book a 1:1 with the team any time, to learn how to add and manage readings, ask questions or troubleshoot issues.  We look forward to hearing from you!

The new Bookmarking Extension Button for Chrome has been released ! The current one will stop being supported at the end of this year, so Talis have provided an updated version. This will replace the current Extension bookmarking button, and will improve the bookmarking experience including bookmarking from Youtube !.

It’s  easy to install, and on most home machines you will probably see that it is already sitting neatly where your previous button was located on Chrome.

The new icon is now a bright green circle with a T in the middle.

New Bookmarking Extension button

However, if you cannot find the bookmarking extension on Chrome follow the steps below:

• Select the Jigsaw icon on the Extension toolbar
• Click on the “Pin” icon next to Talis Aspire Reading Lists to “pin” it to your browser
• You should now be able to see the “T” icon

Chrome Bookmarking Extension with pin

Versions for other browsers will be released over the coming days and we will let you know when these are available.

Edit 10.10.2024: this issue is now starting to be resolved.

When your browser updates it will automatically update the ‘Bookmarking extension’: you will know this has happened as the icon will also update to a letter ‘T’ in a blue-green dot. Once updated, bookmarking from YouTube will be supported again. Chrome has already updated and other browsers will follow (depending on the browser’s own timelines for updates).

Further details can be found on the Talis Aspire Updated Bookmarking Extension FAQ or, as always, do get in touch with any questions!

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A temporary issue has been identified when bookmarking from YouTube. Clicking on the Bookmaking Extension button does not create a link to a YouTube page as usual.

The software provider (Talis) is working to fix this.  Until it is fixed you may find it helpful to use the workaround of adding a resource manually: from the ReadingLists@UCL home page, navigate to your ‘My Bookmarks’, then select ‘Add’ and ‘Add manually’.

Click image to enlarge

Complete the fields by copying the URL and title of the YouTube page as a minimum (or add more metadata as you prefer).  If you have any difficulties please contact us for more support.

Many apologies for the inconvenience, particularly at a busy time when you are preparing readings for the new academic year.  We will update this blog when the issue has been resolved.

We are happy to announce that our ReadingLists@UCL Guide now has an additional page on ‘Liberating the Curriculum’.

It is aimed at staff looking to diversify or review their curriculum.  There are many approaches to diversifying or decolonising your course, but as representative of a module’s recommended resources, a reading list can be a natural starting point.

Perhaps you need some inspiration to find a way into diversifying your readings? Or your project may be easier for knowing how to extract data from your online reading list for analysis. This page has a concise selection of resources, activities and case studies to get started or engage your students in the process.

This resource is a work in progress and we would be delighted to have your feedback on it, or hear about any resources or new projects you think would be useful additions.  You can email feedback to the ReadingLists@UCL team.

In nutrition, one school of thought prefers to add variety into one’s diet, for example eating ‘a rainbow’ of fruit and vegetables, rather than demonising ‘bad’ foods by recommending a decrease in fat / sugar consumption.  This approach balances out the less nutritious ingredients without the need to exclude any food groups.

“Muffin Tin Monday – rainbow of food for St. Patrick’s Day” by anotherlunch.com

As in good nutrition, so with a varied reading diet.  If you are reading a little more literature by African authors, or texts taking a social model of disability approach, you may have less room for Eurocentric, male-dominated or white-biased views.

Recent newspaper articles show that what one person thinks a varied diet, another considers censorship or blacklisting of literature.  As a profession librarians are ethically opposed to censorship and UK HEIs have not banned any books.  There has however been a student-led movement in Liberating, Decolonising, broadening or diversifying curriculum and institutions, that teaching departments and libraries have engaged with to varying degrees.  Reading lists are a small part of this, but can be a key, tangible window on course content, so is often an accessible first step in reviewing a module.

In the news articles, trigger or content warnings are conflated with discouraging reading, or even censorship of texts.  If you use content warnings on your reading lists you may not agree that this is a logical conclusion.  Content warnings can look like metadata: that is, data about data.  Keywords to help the reader navigate a list of resources, rather than limiting access to them. Indeed adding notes is something we encourage as best practice when setting readings, to set context and expectation.

We will shortly be publishing some suggestions on how you might use your reading list to evaluate module content through through a liberated lens [edit: now available in the blog post Liberating your Reading List‘]. Involving student collaborators in this work can develop their information literacy skills as they assist in evaluating readings, and also add variety to your module readings, benefitting from the multiple backgrounds and experiences of the student body.

The canon is still there, in both reading lists and library: nobody has lost any literature.  But an outcome of learning how to evaluate their reading diet is that students develop better critical appraisal skills in their research and reading.  An environment of polarised opinion only hinders this progress.  Now isn’t that headline news?

Do you have a lovely reading list that deserves some applause? Or know a colleague’s reading list that is a neat exemplar?  A community of UK university librarians, who work with reading lists using the same software, put forward their most esteemed reading lists to be ‘reading list of the month’.  The winner is chosen by Talis, the software creator.

This month’s list is Children’s Literature Through the Ages by Mathew Tobin from Oxford Brookes University.  My favourite feature is the introduction video which explains the structure of the list and how to make the most of using it.  It is immediately engaging, shows how to navigate from Moodle to the list, and addresses print vs electronic sourcing.  The list demonstrates many of the excellent points we recommend in our ReadingLists@UCL Best Practice guide: it is clearly structured,  readings are signposted as ‘Essential’ or ‘Recommended’, and annotations (‘student notes’) enrich the student’s understanding of the resource.

If this inspires you to update your list for the new academic year, let us know and we’ll happily put your list forward to be a top list next time!  If you need any help with your reading list, or have questions around purchasing new resources, please don’t hesitate to get in touch (email).

Ever asked yourself the question, “How can I make my course readings accessible”?

Well, this is exactly the question the TLS team set out to answer at the lunchtime marketplace session at the recent 2022 UCL Education Conference.

We were thrilled to be able to attend the event, as this was a fantastic opportunity for us to get out there and talk to people about our services, whether it’s ReadingLists@UCL, course readings digitisation, or our copyright support services. As a user-focused team it’s essential that we engage with the academic community to understand how we can best support their teaching and learning activities. So this was also a brilliant opportunity to hear from lots of different staff and students, and learn more about how we can support them in getting the most out of their teaching.

A particularly pleasant surprise was the sheer range of people who came to speak to us – and the range of topics they were interested in! We had queries from UCL academics and PhD students about setting up reading lists, many of whom wanted to know more about how to replace document-based reading lists with online lists. As well as talking them through it, we ran a couple of demos of the ReadingLists@UCL service on our laptop. This is something we’re always happy to do, so get in touch if you want to arrange a virtual session!

We also had lots of queries about copyright issues. These mostly came either from academics teaching PhD research skills, or from PhD students interested in the copyright rules affecting their theses (e.g. the copyright status of photographs they wanted to include). We explained the tailored support and advice we could offer in this area, and our Copyright for PHD Students leaflets went like hotcakes!

Someone asked us whether films held on DVD can be converted to streams for inclusion on online reading lists (answer: they usually can!). And lots of people just wanted to know more about what TLS did in general – so we were happy to tell them. We also had a really interesting discussion with a couple of students about accessibility, and the many ways TLS services support this important area.

So in all this was a brilliant opportunity to get out and about and speak to people, promote awareness of TLS and our services, and learn more about what’s on people’s minds when it comes to things like course readings and copyright. The pandemic has made it harder to engage with the academic community – while at the same time increasing the need for support for remote learning. So being able go to an in-person event again was brilliant. Looking forward to the next one!