Wednesday 21 October 2009

Electronic Reading Lists

On the library website, there is a page titled Electronic Reading Lists. You can find it under Library Resources. This page contains a list of all the module reading lists that have been given to us and a link to the library catalogue showing what books on those reading lists we have in the library. To illustrate, at the time of writing the first module is AC161 Introduction to Accounting. Clicking on that link, or indeed the link in the previous sentence, takes you to the library catalogue and searches the catalogue for books on the reading list AC161. Here's a wee screenshot:

Enter the exciting world of accountancy!
Note that the library catalogue is searching the field "reading list" for the module code "ac161". We have added "reading list" to the list of fields that you can search in the library catalogue and moved it to the top of the list of fields in the advanced search option. You can search by module code or module title (module code is better as it will unique).
If you read this blog, or use the library catalogue online, you know that we have had some ...problems with the catalogue in the recent past. A side-effect of these problems is the "reading list" field a) being renamed "group" and b) being removed the top of the advanced search field list. Hence if you don't see "reading list" at the top, you will know that we had some problems with catalogue and have had to reinstall the software or something.
Two other observations: these are the reading that have been given to us. If we don't have any of the books on your reading list, it's 99.999% certain that your lecturer has not provided us with the reading list for this module (there is, at the time of writing a small backlog of 20 or so reading lists to add to the library website, but you should be able find your modules by searching the catalogue directly). Finally these are not the reading lists themselves, these are the books on the reading lists that we have in the library. If we don't have the book (yet), it's almost certainly due to the book being out of print, but we do leave no stone unturned in our efforts to find second-hand copies, no, honestly, we do.

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