Each morning we arrive to many requests for editing access to online reading lists; and teaching and support staff have been calling into our Wednesday drop-in for training in how to best use them.  Term 1 is only a few days away and there much preparation going on!

In the run up to induction week, site and subject liaison librarians have also been requesting support material to hand out in induction packs, or to refresh a notice board.

The images here are two posters that are available as pdf to print for your department, and also bundles of Owl postcards.  Please get in touch with TLS to request any of these.

To particularly help those Departmental Administrators, Librarians and other support staff, our webpages ReadingLists@UCL for Support Staff is being updated as we speak.  Please let us know if there is anything else that we can usefully add there to help you!

Ovid is a large database which provides access to many journals, books and some audio-visual resources.  If you need to bookmark a journal article from here you will find the link is not stable: when you return to the reading the link may not work – and therefore is not helpful to your students.

The easy solution

Make a basic bookmark and the library will turn this into a stable link for you:

• Bookmark the page as usual: in Ovid, this works beautifully so all the bibliographic data will pull through nicely.
• Use the ‘Library note’ to flag that the link needs upgrading.
• When you have completed your reading list, click ‘Request review’.  TLS will be notified to check your list and we will update the link to a stable link.

How is this done?

A surprising number of academics, learning technologists and librarians ask how they can do this themselves, so the following is for them:

• Navigate to the article
• First click on ‘Email jumpstart’ and from the popup box, copy the jumpstart URL (click on the image below for the screenshot)
• Then bookmark as usual from the article, but replace the ‘Weblink’ with the ‘jumpstart’ URL.

For help with bookmarking from other specialist resources, look to the tag cloud on the right of this page and select ‘non-standard bookmarking‘. Or, of course, do get in touch any time.

PEP-Web is a database for Psychoanalytic resources (books, journals, video etc.).   It used to be a little more tricky to bookmark from however when this was flagged to Talis, the software owners behind ReadingLists@UCL, they were able to create a fix so the two systems now interact well.

When you search through the library catalogue for a journal, and click ‘View online’ you

Different journal providers

may be offered more than one journal provider:

PEP-Web has a good archive back to the 1920s and is very specialist, so it may be the only source for some readings. From this screen click on ‘Go’ and then navigate to the relevant reading.

Journal articles in PEP-Web do not have a DOI however the online reading list system will create a good bookmark despite this.

• Click on your ‘Add to my bookmarks’ button as usual and the correct bibliographic data will be pulled through into the bookmark.
• The weblink is also stable, so you need do nothing more than save the bookmark into a particular reading list!

If you are aware of any databases or resources that don’t bookmark well, please let us know so we can work with Talis to solve this.

For help with bookmarking from other specialist resources, look to the tag cloud on the right of this page and select ‘non-standard bookmarking‘. Or, of course, do get in touch any time.

Harvard Business Review articles are often key resources for students across UCL, particularly in the UCL School of Management.

UCL Library subscribes to this resource online, making it readily available to students.  It is available through the EBSCOhost platform. However academics wishing to direct students to readings will find that technical measures inhibit them from creating a durable link to an article.  This is to reinforce the licence terms which do not allow academic institutions to use HBR material in ‘electronic course packs, persistent linking from syllabi or by any other means of incorporating the content into course resources.’.

How to help students to key readings, whilst still respecting the licence restrictions?  You can signal to students which readings are interesting to read, and the library will turn this into a permitted link at the most granular level allowed.

• Bookmark the page as usual, so enough of the bibliographic detail is saved to be clear which reading you are recommending. Even more helpful, add the ‘Accession number’ from the article into the student or library note.
• Use the ‘Library note’ to flag that this is an HBR link which needs upgrading.
• When you have completed your reading list, click ‘Request review’.  TLS will be notified to check your list and we will update the link to a stable link, from where students can reasonably click to search for the relevant article.

For help with bookmarking from other specialist resources, look to the tag cloud on the right of this page and select ‘non-standard bookmarking‘. Or, of course, do get in touch any time.

Many academics encourage students to research more widely or use libraries beyond UCL.  If you wish to add a book to an online reading list that is not in UCL’s Explore catalogue, COPAC is a useful alternative.  It is a union catalogue, searching 90+ UK library catalogues including the British Library, University libraries and specialist research libraries.  Most teaching staff prefer this to a commercial alternative, such as Amazon or online bookshops.

Bookmarking from COPAC is slightly different.  Start as usual:

• Navigate to the title of the relevant item
• click on the ‘Add to My Bookmarks’ button

At this point, instead of turning into the bookmarking screen, you will see a new link called ‘Bookmark to reading list’ appear to the right of the bibliographic information, under the locations details (see below):

• click on this ‘Bookmark to reading list’ link to bookmark the item as usual (ignore the contents of the screen on the right).
• check the item links correctly from the reading list.

This has been a frequent question this week – even from one of our ReadingLists@UCL team!

For other FAQs on non-standard bookmarking, look to the tag cloud on the right of this page and select ‘non-standard bookmarking’

Earlier this year I met with the MAPS Faculty Library Committee to give them a quick introduction to ReadingLists@UCL.  The composition of this meeting was really good because as well as academics the attendees included the Subject Librarian, the StAR (Student Academic Representative), academic/student liaison and an administrator, so I could showcase the benefits of the online reading lists to all of these audiences.

Some departments in MAPS find that they have little need for books in their teaching so this was the perfect opportunity to illustrate that a reading list does not have to be stuffed full of references to books and journals, but instead can be as little as a few links to relevant professional organisations that students need to be aware of. The Q&A session was followed by a brief demo of what reading lists could contain, where I emphasised various online resources, not just books.

Following on from the meeting we were tasked with putting together a short ‘crib sheet’ for the department. We already have the online ‘Quick Guide’, but we tailored another guide for the MAPS faculty and included an example of how to link to a website, how to link reading lists to Moodle blocks and how to install the Bookmarking Button. The resulting MAPS Getting Started with online lists guide is now online.

We further customised the guide with a list of suggested resources which could be useful, particularly on courses where reading lists aren’t commonly used.  Being familiar with the subject areas, Robert Tomaszewski, the Subject Librarian, was very happy to contribute these suggested resources.

This list of suggested resources is also presented as an online list to illustrate how it works in practice.  MAPS lecturers can include the resources in their own reading lists, or link to the guide.  For example, there is a guide to avoiding plagiarism, or you might prefer to include the link to UCL’s current plagiarism guidelines for students, as some other academics have also done on their reading lists.

MAPS have chosen to recommend that their lecturers create their own lists. We set the lists up, send editing access to the tutor and offer a quick orientation, so they can start managing their list. Take a look at an interesting list.

This strategy has worked fantastically well for the Faculty, with resulting successes so far of 99 out of 103 courses for Mathematics (96%) having an online reading list, whilst Statistical Science have reached the magic 100%. A similar approach could be taken by other Departments with low or relatively low take-up of reading lists, with suggested resources tailored to each department.

There are of course many alternative approaches to increase the number of reading lists and improve the student experience.  Please email us for further information, or to request a ReadingLists@UCL poster, aimed at either students or staff, which you can customise for your department.

This Saturday 21st February Hazel and I took the ReadingLists@UCL advocacy campaign

into the student heartland of the UCLU Education Conference, held this year at the Institute of Child Health.

Our stall gave us the opportunity showcase the highlights and benefits of the online reading lists in a very visual manner that appealed to the attendees.

We showed students that online reading lists allowed them to view readings in different citation styles, or export the citations to Endnote, Reference Manager, Zotero etc. for use in their work; they could sort the resources on their list by ‘type’ or ‘importance’, for example to group all essential readings together.  In essence, they could make the list their own by adding private notes and a reading status for each item.

Many of the students were unaware of the online reading lists and when shown the benefits were very impressed and determined to ask their lecturers why their courses did not have one!   Some students actually discovered they did have a reading list – only they hadn’t been shown how to access it, and were delighted to find they could do so seamlessly from Moodle, as long as the course tutor or administrator had remembered to switch on the Library Resources block.

The Student Academic Representatives, or StARS as they are better known, were particularly impressed. They will be taking back the message that online reading lists are an essential part of the student learning experience at UCL and need to be more widely adopted by departments across UCL.

We reminded the students that ReadingLists@UCL are best for:

• Revising from home
• Clear guidance on essential / recommended readings
• Distance learning courses
• Many full text readings so no need to visit the library…
• …but also, live links to the library catalogue to see if books are on the shelf right now! If not, just click through to reserve books
• Making your own notes on each reading
• Consistency across programmes

For information and FAQs for students, visit www.ucl.ac.uk/library/teaching-support/reading-lists/student

• No list set up? Your course tutor or departmental administrator can request an online reading list, if appropriate for your course
• Ask your Subject or Site Librarian for help
• Email: readinglists@ucl.ac.uk