Over the last five months the Library has been working on converting reading lists to the new Reading Lists @ LSE system. This new tool works alongside Moodle to provide students and teachers an intuitive, consistent, and easy-to-use way of displaying and managing reading lists.

Why are LSE doing this? The Reading Lists @ LSE system offers benefits in three main areas:

For students it offers a more consistent experience. The overall interface and experience of reading lists is consistent across different courses and departments – while still allowing teachers to structure individual lists in whatever way they choose. Students are presented with a visually clear and intuitive display, which also provides a number of useful additional functions – including quick links directly to electronic versions of readings; up-to-date information about Library holdings; and tools for annotating and organizing their study. Feedback from students has been universally popular…

For teachers and administrators it’s a simple but powerful tool for compiling and editing reading lists. Teachers can grab references and citations from around the web, without the need to copy and paste or transcribe bibliographic information. Stable and reliable link through to Ejournals, ebooks, and online recordsare created automatically. CLT have updated the web pages about Reading Lists in Moodle with further information.For the Library it provides consistent information about what readings are required across different courses – the Library is automatically notified of changes to reading lists, and they can easily identify where key texts are in use across multiple courses – speeding up our ordering processes and ensuring that they buy the right number of materials to support all LSE programmes.

Progress so far

A small army of Library staff have pulled out all the stops over the last few months to populate the system with lists taken from Moodle this academic year. They have converted lists for over 90% of undergraduate courses, along with a sizeable chunk of postgraduate courses. In total they have migrated – largely by hand – almost 90,000 individual citations for books, chapters, journal articles, webpages, videos, working papers, case studies, law reports, and more, converting lists from every department in the School – from the very smallest (a single item) to the very largest (a whopper of a list containing over 1,300 references).

The Library now handing these lists over to teachers and Moodle editors as they start to make changes to their lists for the 2013/14 session.

What happens next?

Academic support librarians are currently contacting teachers and administrative staff in each department to arrange the handover of lists – however if you’re already starting to think about changes or amendments to next year’s lists then please do get in touch with library.teaching.support@lse.ac.uk straight away, so we can make sure you’re making those changes directly into the new system. The Library can provide you with orientation and training, as well as ongoing support in your use of the system.