The title above refers to a half day WESLINK event on reading lists which I was lucky enough to be invited to on Wednesday. The event was hosted at Keele (big shout out to my SatNav for finding the place). It started with a buffet lunch, followed by presentations from three institutions on how they currently manage their reading/resource lists:

  1. Spreadsheets at Keele University
  2. Talis List at the University of Birmingham
  3. LORLS at Loughborough University (by yours truly).

The day finished with a group discussion. One of the main things I picked up from this was the differences in approach as to who edits the reading lists. Some sites were strongly in favour of the library being responsible to all editing of online reading lists. At Loughborough we’ve always been keen for academics to edit the lists themselves, after all they are the intellectual creators of the lists.

It also seems very inefficient for the library to re-enter information into a system when the academics are most likely already doing this (even if they are just using Word). Ideally if the information can be entered just once, by the academic into the online system, this should free up time for all concerned: library staff not acting as data entry clerks and academics not having to check others interpretation of their work.

However in order for this to happen the system needs to be as easy as possible for the academic to use. This is why as part of our LORLS we’ve been developing BibGrab.