Author Archives: Sarah Ames

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)

 

Resource Lists workshops

We’re running two Resource Lists workshops next week for academic staff and course administrators.

By the end of the workshop, you’ll be able to use Talis Aspire to create your own resource lists. We’ll also explain how the Library is using Resource Lists to manage Course Collections and provide access to core reading materials for students.

Booking open

Booking is now open on MyEd for the following dates:

3 October

7 October

One-to-one and refresher training

We’re also happy to come to you and hold one-to-one or refresher sessions to fit around Course Organisers’ schedules: please contact Library.Learning@ed.ac.uk

More information about the Resource List services is available on our webpages:

Resource Lists webpages

Add books not held by the Library to your Resource List

If the Library doesn’t hold a book that you’d like to add to your list, this shouldn’t stop you adding it anyway – in fact, one of the reasons we’re using Resource Lists is to inform our course materials purchasing decisions, so it’s important that you flag it up to us.

Bookmarking a book not held in the Library’s collections

When you’re unable to find a book in DiscoverEd, we’d recommend you carry out the following steps:

  1. Find the book on another website, such as Amazon or the NLS;
  2. ‘Bookmark’ the book from this page (consult our guidance on bookmarking to find out how to do this – Add Bookmarks);
  3. Check that the bibliographic details are as complete as possible (also remember to remove any URL to Amazon) – you can add more using the drop down list at the bottom of the screen;
  4. Add the reading to your list;
  5. Send your list in for a Library review.

Submit your list for a ‘review’

This final point is particularly important: unless you submit your resource list for a ‘review’, the Library won’t see your list and won’t be able to act. Whenever you would like the Library to check or act on items on your list, send it for a review.

Request a Library review of your list

If you have any questions about this, or about Resource Lists in general, please email Library.Learning@ed.ac.uk

Resource Lists drop-ins

While course organisers are busy reviewing reading lists over the summer months, we’ll be running a series of lunchtime Resource Lists drop in sessions: we know that many of you only need to use the system once a year so we’ll be on hand to provide any guidance or assistance you’d like as you refresh your lists.

What we can help with

If you have any questions at all about your resource lists, or want to find out more about how to create a new one or what you can do with resource lists, please feel free to come along.

Topics that come up frequently are:

  • How to prepare your list for rollover and the new semester;
  • How to create and add bookmarks;
  • Adding your list to LEARN or Moodle;
  • Adding online articles or ebooks to your list.

We’ll also be happy to run through our workbook with you and to set you up in the system.

When to come

We’ll be in the Main Library at the following times:

12-1pm, 25 May (room 1.10)

1-2pm, 31 May (room 1.10)

12-1pm, 8 June (room 1.12)

12-1pm, 14 June (room 1.10)

12-1pm, 21 June (room 1.10)

12-1pm, 30 June (room 1.10)

12-1pm, 7 July (room 1.12)

Contact us

If you’d like to contact us by email with any questions instead, or just drop us a line to let us know you’ll be coming, please email library.learning@ed.ac.uk

Resource Lists: summer deadlines and ‘rollover’

We’ll soon be circulating information about this year’s ‘rollover’ – the annual update when existing Resource Lists for the current academic year are copied over to the next academic year, 2016/17.

If you’ve made changes, submit your list for review by 18 July

Course Organisers creating their own lists should submit them for review by 18 July if there are changes that that the Library needs to act on.

This might be if there’s been an increase in student numbers; if you have new scan requests; or if you’ve added new resources to your list and you’d like the Library to purchase new or additional copies.

Submitting a review by 18 July gives the Library as much time as possible to process any book orders and E-reserve requests.

Of course, you can continue to submit lists for review after this deadline, and we will do our best to fulfil requests, but they will not be prioritised.

How to request a review

Guidance about when you should ask for a review, and how to request one, is available on our webpages:

Request a Library review of your list

Please contact us at Library.Learning@ed.ac.uk if you have any questions about the rollover or reviews process.

 

Deadlines announced for Resource Lists service

The deadlines for new Resource Lists for Semester 1 2016/17 will be:

4 July – Lists submitted to the Library for creation

18 July – Lists created by Course Organiser and submitted for review

These deadlines give us as much time as possible to process any book orders and Ereserve requests.

Please note that lists submitted after the deadlines will be accepted, but not prioritised.

Submit your list to the Library

If you’d like the Library to create your list, you’ll need to provide us with:

  • an annotated reading list (with items flagged as ‘Essential’; ‘Recommended’; or ‘Further reading’);
  • a completed Resource List coversheet.

Find our more information about Library-created lists, and how to request one, on the Resource Lists webpages:

Resource List created by Library

Resource List DIY

If you’d prefer to create your list yourself, take a look at our ‘Get started’ guide:

Resource List created by Academic

Our new, shortened user guides will also provide all the information you need to get up and running:

User guides

Questions

If you have any questions about the Resource Lists service, please email Library.Learning@ed.ac.uk

Resource Lists survey

There are only two weeks left for course organisers to complete our short, annual survey.

If you currently use Resource Lists, or even if you’ve signed up but never published a list, please take five minutes to participate and answer a range of questions about our service:

Complete the Resource Lists survey

We’ll be using the results from this year’s survey to inform our future planning and to improve our service: your feedback is very important to us.

If you have any questions about Resource Lists, please email Library.Learning@ed.ac.uk

New user guides for Resource Lists

We’ve been reviewing and revamping our user guides, to help make using Resource Lists @ Edinburgh even easier.

Our new, slimmed-down guides offer you all you need to get started with Resource Lists.

On our website, you can now find:

  • Get started: 8 steps to publishing a Resource List (workbook)
  • Create and add bookmarks
  • Add a Resource List to LEARN or Moodle
  • Review and publish

Resource Lists user guides

If you have any questions about Resource Lists, please contact Library.Learning@ed.ac.uk

Resource Lists workshops

We’re running Resource Lists workshops in May and June for academic staff and course administrators.

By the end of the workshop, you’ll be able to use Talis Aspire to create your own resource lists. We’ll also explain how the Library is using Resource Lists to manage Course Collections and provide access to core reading materials for students.

Booking open

Booking is now open on MyEd for the following dates:

5 May (1400-1600)

10 May (1000-1200)

23 May (1400-1600)

8 June (1400-1600)

15 June (1000-1200)

20 June (1400-1600)

One-to-one and refresher training

We’re also happy to come to you and hold one-to-one or refresher sessions to fit around Course Organisers’ schedules: please contact Library.Learning@ed.ac.uk

More information about the Resource List services is available on the IS website:

Resource Lists webpages

Acquisitions generated from Resource Lists

The Library has been working hard to meet student expectations by buying more of the books on course reading lists. Using the Resource List service lets us know what the core texts are.

As result, it’s been a bumper year for new book requests coming from Resource Lists. Over the course of 2015/16, Resource Lists have generated around 1,400 book recommendations.

That’s up to 4,800 new books, additional copies or ebooks available to students.

New books now added to Resource Lists

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been working our way through the long list of new acquisitions and adding links to them to your Resource Lists.

If you’ve had an email from us letting you know that we’ve added new items, please remember to publish your list so that your students can see the changes!

Update your lists

While we try to help by adding links to new books, we can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to do this quickly.

So, when you receive an email notifying you that new books are available, please remember to update your Resource List by adding a new bookmark; then republish your list to make the change live.

There are some helpful guides about editing and updating your lists on our webpages:

User guides webpages

How the Library decides what to buy

For more information about the criteria we use to determine what to buy, have a look at the IS website:

Resource Lists webpages

If you have any questions about the Resource List service, please email Library.Learning@ed.ac.uk