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’.

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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!

The rollover is complete! All your 2019-20 reading lists have been archived and a copy created for 2020-21, which you can edit straight away.

• If modules are not running this year, please let us know so we can archive the list. This hides it from view to avoid confusion and also saves it for future re-use.
• To set up new lists get in touch or see our Getting Started help.

Over the summer you can prepare your reading lists for the new academic year: you just need to review, edit and publish!

Do my digitised readings also roll forward?

When your new list is created, the digitised readings (digitised under the CLA licence and added to your list by the TLS team) also copy forward.  There is a separate, behind-the-scenes process in June where the readings are re-checked automatically for the coming year. If your module is not running let us know so we can archive the digitised readings, ready for another year.

If any digitised readings were not digitised under the CLA licence, but instead had direct copyright permission granted then the links to these readings will temporarily break.  TLS need to re-request copyright permission for the coming year and re-instate the links to the digital reading.  This is a task that TLS does annually and they will be in touch if your readings are affected.

And finally don’t forget the editing interface is being updated on 16th July.  See the Editing Interface Upgrade blog post for more details.

ReadingLists@UCL has had access to a new editing interface for more than a year and many new list editors are already using it.  July 16th will see the final change to the new editing interface when the rest of UCL switches over.  This will only be noticable to people with editing access to a reading list.

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If you are currently using the ‘Classic’ editing view which looks like this (click on thumbnail to enlarge), then on July 16th the view will change.

The new look is … well, a good deal like the usual view!  Once logged

(Click to enlarge)

in though, moving editing buttons (‘Add resource / Add paragraph / Add section’) become available as you move around the screen.  To the far right of the resource the ellipsis or three dots indicate a drop down menu of more options.

The main change is that you stay in the usual list view to edit, much like editing a Moodle page.

• For a demonstration, our two short ‘Getting started…’ videos (under ‘Quick guides’) show how to edit a reading list using the new view.
• You may also find interesting A short ‘overview’ article by the software creator, Talis, on the new list view.  This is not specific to UCL and uses different branding.

Please get in touch with us for help, including the following:

• a 1:1 guided Teams session on how to edit and manage your reading list
• to request editing access to a reading list, or for a new list to be set up
• library assistance with populating your reading list

Each summer the reading lists have a new copy made for the new academic year, much like the Moodle snapshot.  This year the rollover is scheduled for the evening of Monday 13th July 2020.  From about 5pm that day:

• Reading lists for 2019-20 will have an exact copy made for 2020-21, which will publish immediately
• The old version (2019-20) will archive, which means it will disappear from public view but can be found and re-used in future years if needed
• Students will have continuous access to their reading lists: there is no down time for viewing lists
• Editing rights remain constant, so list editors are able to edit the new lists as soon as they appear
• Lists already set up as 2020-2021 will be unaffected by the rollover

Please note:

• Unpublished changes will not copy forward into the new list: please publish your lists before 5pm 13th July if you wish your updates to be carried forward.
• We suggest you stop editing reading lists before 5pm on 13^th July, and continue editing when you can see it has the 2020-21 date stamp – certainly from the next morning Tuesday 14th July, if not sooner.
• The Moodle ‘Library resources’ block needs no maintenance and will continue to link to the most recent year’s list.  The optional integration ‘Reading list items’ requires checking and possibly some re-linking of resources, particularly after the reading list has been updated for the new year.
• To have old courses archived, new lists set up, or current module names amended, email us your requests!
• A note on Late Summer Assessments for academic year 2019-20.

Do you need a refresher on how to edit and manage your lists?  The ReadingLists@UCL webpages have online quick guides including short videos, and FAQs. Though working remotely, the TLS team still offer 1:1 set up and refresher training through Teams.  Get in touch and you could walk away with a new list set up and ready to go, have guidance on how to link to non-standard resources, or find out how to embed reading lists in Moodle.

Students involved in the Late Summer Assessments (24 August – 11 September 2020) may need to consult their reading list for revision.

‘Exams Start… Now’ by Ryan McGilchrist

The reading list rollover on 13th July means that the 2019-20 reading lists will archive.  From 14h July the lists available to view will be the new lists for academic year 2020-21;  these are available to update immediately for the new session.

If you are aware of students who may need access to the 2019-20 version of the lists:

• students can take a copy of the list by using the ‘View & Export’ button – before 5pm on 13th July
• or save the URL of the list, which will continue to work even after the list is archived
• or if a list has already archived, let us know that it needs to be revived, and we can do this.

The Exam papers archive remains available all year round, and the papers can also be searched for via Explore, the library catalogue.  Students will need to log in with their UCL ID when accessing these from off campus.

Google Chrome version 80 is being rolled out.  After 17th February using Chrome 80 may cause an error logging to some services, including ReadingLists@UCL.

If you use Chrome 80 and find you are unable to log in, workarounds include:

• Use a different browser.
• Use Desktop@UCL: UCL has not yet updated its Chrome browser so it will work fine.
• Change the SameSite settings in your Chrome 80 browser.  Details of how to do this are in yesterday’s ISD update post.

Talis, the software owner behind ReadingLists@UCL, is also working to solve this from their end.  For the most up to date information on this please check the ISD homepage notices.