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Keywords
Reading lists, Databases, Library projects, University libraries
Abstract
Following a proposal at Loughborough University that "reading lists should be made available online" the university library undertook responsibility to design and develop a system to achieve this aim. Using open source tools the rapid development of a reading list management system soon followed, and by Autumn 2000 the solution had been successfully implemented at the university. The system is now available to other institutions as open source software.
Background
At Loughborough our first experiences of online reading lists came seven years ago with the introduction of a course-reading module as part of our then LMS (Library Management System). This allowed us to tag the bibliographic works in our database as being on a given course module, and allowed users to search by module title, module code or name of the academic and view a list of matching works. The service was released to users with little or no publicity and the only feedback we got was from students who wanted browseable lists of academics and module names rather than have to remember the name to enter in the search prompts; we did some local development of the library catalogue to achieve this.
In February 1999 the University's Learning and Teaching Committee approached the library with a view to developing a better service for all. An evaluation of the existing system was carried out and the following limitations were highlighted:
* only material held by the library was listed;
* it did not show the academic's annotations: either for the list in general or against individual works;
* works on a list could only be listed alphabetically; and
* only a minority of lists were held.
Both the committee and the library were very keen that these problems should be addressed. The latter problem was of particular concern to the library as only a minority of academics ever sent their reading lists to the library. With access to all the academic's reading lists the library would be better able to manage its stock (e.g. acquisition of new material, putting items into the short loan collection) to support the teaching needs of the taught course students.
It was decided to...