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!

Traffic Cones by Natesh Ramasamy

From Monday 31st July 3pm – Thursday 3rd August 9am, there will be some disruption to ReadingLists@UCL.

Aleph, the Library Management System behind UCL’s Explore catalogue, is having its server moved as part of the ongoing ISD datacentre migration. This will mean a necessary outage of the library catalogue.

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 the texts are on the shelf or out on loan.  The shelfmark, however will remain on display (see screenshot below).
• 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 are unaffected.  You can also bookmark from COPAC, though its information is not live; bookmarking from COPAC has an extra step.  And of course do get in touch with the ReadingLists@UCL team if you need any help.

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

Library Availability

The online reading lists have rolled over succesfully, creating copies of all lists ready for the 2017-18 session.  The reading lists for 2016-17 have been archived.

Summer reading

In TLS we are preparing for the annual ‘rollover’ of ReadingLists@UCL.

This is the final task of the academic year for us: the CLA report of UCL’s digitised readings was sent in June, the majority of teaching has finished, and the exam period too has ended.

Each summer the reading lists have a new copy made for the September term, much like the Moodle snapshot.  This year the rollover is scheduled for Tuesday 18th July 2017.  In brief:

• Reading lists for 2016-17 will have an exact copy made for 2017-18, which will publish immediately
• Students and staff will have continuous access to their reading lists
  
• Editing rights remain constant, so academics and teaching support staff are able to edit the new lists straight away
• The old version of the reading list (2016-17) will archive, which means it will disappear from public view but can be found and re-used in future years if needed
• Existing 2017-18 lists will be totally unaffected.

Please note:

• Unpublished changes will not be copied onto the new list: please publish your lists before 18th July if you wish the changes to be carried forward.
• If you would like reading lists removed – for example if a course is no longer being taught – please email us any time
• Similarly, if any courses have updated titles or course codes, email us to request the details are updated.

Do you need a refresher on how to edit and manage your lists?  Drop in to our office in Senate House on Wednesday afternoons, 2.30 – 4.30pm for a quick session. The ReadingLists@UCL webpages also have guides, FAQs and contact details.

To help departments in their take up of online reading lists, and also promote copyright awareness and good practice, Teaching and Learning Services (TLS) have some dedicated project staff time, this June and July.

We are offering to ‘health check’ Moodle courses: transferring readings from Moodle onto online reading lists, and ensuring digitised readings are copyright complaint by using the CLA licence.   If you think your Moodle module would benefit from a tidy ready for next session, or are setting up a new module and would like our help, do get in touch!

We will also input new reading lists for teaching staff who would like to use online reading lists but don’t have time for the initial set up.

Please be aware that our project staff are only available until July 31^st.  Contact us at readinglists@ucl.ac.uk  and we will complete work on a first come, first served basis!

As usual, we continue to offer 1:1 sessions and Wednesday afternoon drop-ins in Senate House, for getting started or refresher training with reading lists.

Would a ‘getting started’ session help you get ahead?  Or perhaps a refresher in adding readings would save you some time?

Drop in to the TLS office on a Wednesday afternoon 2.30-4.30pm in Terms 2 and 3 this

year.  We are on hand to trouble-shoot problems, walk you through linking a reading list to Moodle, or you can just use it as time to set up an online list with someone on hand to speed things along!

This way!

Our office is in UCL Senate House, room 318.  If you aren’t familiar with this UCL Library Hub, ask at the UCL Senate House reception desk, or call the TLS office on 020 3549 5729 (internal x65729).

When you request a new online reading list we always offer a 1:1 orientation (just 20 minutes or so) at your own computer to get you started.  This way, you don’t have to read instructions and everything is tailored to you and your subject.

Other training

• Hazel and Pam regularly visit Teaching Committee or Departmental meetings for a 10-minute introduction or demonstration.
• In January we ran a small group ‘Best Practice’ session for an Engineering department.  In an hour we gave an overview, then invited academics to do the initial set up and add a few different resources into an online list.

If you like the sound of these or have other ideas, get in touch to request training, demonstrations, or for more information!

Happy new year! 2016 was a good year for ReadingLists@UCL.

Here is our year in numbers

• 2705 lists were set up by December 2016. Which represented:
• 57% of all taught modules having an online reading list.
• 407,545 visits (January – December 2016) which equated to:
• 1,528,024 page views

If you are interested in the number of visitors to your reading list, log in to the list and click on the green ‘Dashboard’ button.  It will show the number of page views and how many times each reading has been clicked on in the past 30 days.

You prefer a story to figures?

In this film clip, an academic and student at the Shakespeare Institute, Birmingham, discuss their online reading lists and why they are helpful to their teaching and learning, respectively. They use the same reading list software as UCL, but with a different name. (Length: 3 minutes 53 seconds).

Paul Wilkinson ‘Party Popper

Make a new year resolution

… to guide your students better in 2017 by setting up an online reading list, or updating an existing one.

The TLS team in the library are very happy to help, or drop in to our Senate House office on a Wednesday afternoon for a hands-on session. You could walk away with a list set up and completed!  Something ticked off your to do list: a good start to the year.

The online reading lists have now rolled forward, creating copies of all lists ready for the 2016-17 session.  The reading lists for 2015-16 have been archived.

You are able to continue editing as usual.  In fact, this is the perfect time to update your list: students look at their readings over the summer and it is very easy to add a section of ‘Summer reading / research’.  Even if you haven’t finalised changes to some readings, you can still set up the structure and edit dates and notes.  Though students are very positive about their reading lists, one complaint has been over currency; the last year’s dates were still on display making the student doubt the currency of the readings too.

Do you feel too busy to get re-acquainted with how to update your list?  Come along to our office and we can sit with you to help you log back in and make a few basic changes; or ask us for a quick refresher to get started again.  We set aside Wednesday afternoons 2.30 pm – 4.30 pm for anyone to drop-in, or we are happy to visit you at your desk.

Please drop us an email if you would like to:

• re-use a previous version of your reading list (for example, for those modules that run every other year)
• Archive a reading list if it is not being run in 2016-17
• Change a module title / name on an existing reading list
• Set up a new reading list

One final thing. Your ‘My Lists’ page will still display the 2015-16 lists. From the ‘My Lists’ page:

• To remove older lists, check the boxes left of the list title; at the top of the page click ‘Action’ -> ‘Remove’
• To add in new lists, navigate to the 2016-17 list and click the button ‘Add to my lists’ (top right hand side).
• All reading lists are at the same module URL each year (e.g. http://readinglists.ucl.ac.uk/modules/publg084.html ), this does not change.  The link from Moodle to the reading list (via the ‘Library Resources’ block) is also stable and will link to the same place.