Monthly Archives: October 2016

Prioritising your readings

As you look through the resource lists currently online, you’ll see that readings have priority levels against them: ‘Essential’, ‘Recommended’ and ‘Further reading’. It’s important to prioritise your reading lists for two reasons:

1. The Library applies purchase ratios to resource lists

The priorities are one of the factors we use in our purchase ratios: the Library is using resource lists to ensure that there are sufficient numbers of books on shelves (or ebooks online) for students.

The ratios take student numbers and priority level into account to calculate how many books should be available – and, if they aren’t, how many books the Library will purchase.

The ratios are as follows:

Priority Purchase Location
Essential 1 copy per 20 students Distributed across HUB Reserve, Short and Standard Loan,
Recommended 1 copy per 40 students Short Loan
Further Reading Direct request required from Course Organiser – 1 copy purchased. Standard Loan

There’s more information about these on the Resource Lists webpages:

How the Library will order books for courses

2. The Accessible and Inclusive Learning Policy

Using Resource Lists helps course organisers to comply with the University’s Accessible and Inclusive Learning Policy. This document stipulates that reading lists must indicate priority/relevance of items listed.

More information about this policy is available on the Resource Lists webpages:

Resource Lists and the University’s Accessible and Inclusive Learning Policy (PDF)