Online reading lists

At Continuing Education we provide online reading lists on our website for Weekly Class students. We use the Mark and Email records functions in Web OLIS to create an HTML reading list that we can paste onto our website, and it allows readers to click through to a screenshot of OLIS to check if their books are available:
http://library.conted.ox.ac.uk/weeklyclasses/readinglists/Archaeology/GoodburnBritannia.php

We did this mainly because many of our weekly class students struggle with using the catalogue so we wanted to make it easier for them to find books on their reading lists. However, there are a number of problems.

It's not possible to mark and email records from SOLO or telnet, so we have to use Web OLIS. As it's not possible to limit the search by library in Web OLIS, searching for the Cont Ed copies of books which may have many different records on OLIS can be time-consuming. Furthermore, Web OLIS times out and loses all the marked records if, for example, you have to stop and help a reader. From the reader's perspective, they only get a screenshot of the catalogue, which doesn't allow them to place reservations. They also have to navigate through quite a lot of screens of our website, and I think many of them find this just as difficult as using the catalogue - especially if they then want to search for books which are not on their list, and they have to use the catalogue anyway.

So......I have been experimenting with using tagging in SOLO as an alternative. By tagging the books on a list with a tag that indicates the course title and tutor, and another tag indicating the department (conted) and the start date of the course (eg april 2010), it's possible to create an online reading list that readers can access directly from SOLO. They just need to select "in user tags" on the drop down menu and search for their course.

This is massively easier to set up than the previous system, which involved searching, marking the record, emailing marked records, copying and pasting the HTML from the email onto .php documents, and updating the library website. It will make it a lot easier to simply update reading lists which are substantially the same as last year's, without having to look up every record from scratch. It also allows readers to start from SOLO - which is the first screen they see on library computers - and click straight through to a live OLIS screen from which they can place reservations and access patron functions.

There are limitations to this approach. We can only link items catalogued on SOLO, whereas on our own website we could link individual journal articles and useful websites, as well as including explanatory text. There is also a danger that other SOLO users will use similar tags, which would add unwanted items to the lists. Tags can only be 35 characters long, which means it won't be possible to use the full course title, so readers will need to know the abbreviated course title that we have used. And readers who feel lost in SOLO will probably still feel lost.

So, I'm still playing around with the possibilities and discussing it with colleagues and nothing is decided yet. But I thought I'd share this with other web 2.0 fans!