Get your reading lists ready

Make sure your students can get the resources they need in the next academic year.

Midsummer solstice has passed and the swifts are in the sky, which can mean only one thing – time to start thinking about your module reading lists for the next academic year!

Use the Reading Lists tool in Minerva to create or update your module reading lists before 14 August – our guide to creating or updating a reading list will help.

We continue to provide ebooks and online readings before printed texts to support the shift to online reading and digital education.

Licencing for ebooks is tricky to navigate and there are a few ways that you can help us to make sure your students can access what they need for your module.

Use the “core reading” tag

The “core reading” tag marks the most important items on your module’s list, which means we will prioritise purchasing these as ebooks and etextbooks. We have specialist suppliers for online textbooks who charge an annual subscription based on cohort size. This approach is only affordable for one or two key texts per module, so it helps us to focus on the most important items on the list.

Prioritise your items

Adding the order of priority of core reading in the comments field helps us to understand what order to approach suppliers and speeds up access to online materials, which can be a time-consuming process.

It’s also helpful to understand if it doesn’t matter which of the core reading items is purchased; we can then direct our purchasing to whichever book has the best licence conditions for access.

Use the “OCR” tag for digitising chapters of books

Tag the reference “OCR” (Online Course Readings) for key print items that are necessary for the module. We can digitise a single chapter of a book without paying for additional online access.

Use material already in the Library

Try to use existing library holdings where possible. Use Library Search to find articles and books already available online – you can limit your search to online only using the dropdown menu.

Submit your list as early as you can

Please submit your semester one reading lists before 14 August. We work through the lists as quickly as possible, but we cannot guarantee that lists submitted after this date will be ready for the start of the Autumn term.

We process reading lists in the order we receive them and will let you know when material is available in Minerva. We regularly update our reading list progress page with the volume of requests we are currently working with.

See our webpages on making items available for students for full information about reading lists and online texts.