Many Thanks to Everyone who Responded to our Reading List Survey - Read the Full Report Here

We asked students what they thought of the new system and what improvements they would like to see.

91% of respondents used and like the new system, and they found the tutorials provided by the library helpful. As the students who had watched the online tutorial found it very useful, we’re planning to develop more guides to highlight some of the key features. We will be making these accessible from the Library website.

We also asked students which features they found useful, and which features they would like to see improved. Most suggestions for improved features centred around improved access to online papers. Wherever possible we will provide full-text access to core readings for your course; the main constraint that we have to work with is that we are only able to provide one chapter from a book - unfortunately there is no way around this as we have to comply with the law!

Other suggestions centred around mobile access: at the moment there isn’t a mobile app for the online reading lists, but we will put this forward as an enhancement request to the developers, and we are working on some online guides for downloading your course readings onto different mobile devices.

Another issue users identified was having to enter authentication details a number of times – this is usually because we link to our e-resources through a number of different providers, however we do appreciate that this can be confusing so this year we are hoping to improve this by building more direct, stable links wherever possible.

What the responses to the survey really highlighted to us was that having access to course readings electronically is obviously very important to students, particularly those who are not able to get to the library regularly. Hopefully the improved features of the new reading list system have helped to facilitate that, and we are working to increase the number of downloadable papers next year by providing more digitized papers, and by purchasing more e-books