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Reading Lists Online: guide for academic staff

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Tailoring Reading Lists to Promote Online Resources

Books on iPhone

Why online resources are key

Including e-books that are already in our collection, or available as open access, can be a great way to improve accessibility to resources for your students. To see which e-books we have access to, search Discovery for your topic and filter the results to ‘Books’, ‘Available Online’ and ‘Open Access’.

Please ensure that reading lists for modules delivered online contain only online (electronic) resources. Students taking these modules will not have access to our print books held at Middlesbrough campus.

If it’s absolutely imperative for students to read one particular chapter of a book (or up to 10% of the total publication) which is only available in print book format then consider using the Scanning for Teaching service.

See what online resources are already on your list 

The first step is to check which of the resources you are directing your students to from your reading list are available electronically. A quick way to see this is to Filter your list, to show only the online resources. 

Physical and online resources filter RLO

Use Discovery to Quickly Add Online Resources

There are lots of online resources which can be added using the Discovery search:

  • Books
  • Journal articles and conference papers
  • Newspaper and magazine articles

See the written guidance below for step by step instructions on how to add these onto your reading list.

Adding Online Resources Beyond Discovery

If you can’t find any suitable e-books on Discovery try these open access resources. Use the Talis Extension or bookmarklet tool to add them onto your reading lists. 

The B.C. Open Collection

The B.C. Open Collection provides access to a range of open educational resources (OER) across a variety of subject areas. 

Bloomsbury Collections

The Bloomsbury Collections Open Access e-book collection includes coverage from the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

Cambridge University Press

Open access books from Cambridge University Press.

Directory of Open Access Books

The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is a central repository for open access textbooks.

Google Books

Google Books provides free access to some electronic book samples and previews. The content which is free to access is subject to change.

IntechOpen

IntechOpen provides access to a range of free textbooks covering: Physical Sciences, Engineering and Technology; Life Sciences; Health Sciences; and Social Sciences and Humanities.

Knowledge Unlatched 

Knowledge Unlatched operates a crowd-funding model whereby libraries pay into a fund and Knowledge Unlatched uses these funds to make scholarly books open access and available to all via the Open Research Library. There is a very broad discipline focus including; education, science, mathematics, engineering and languages.

LibreTexts

LibreTexts gives access to over 4000 OER textbooks authored or curated by the LibreTexts community. You can explore and search all of the libraries from LibreTexts here

MERLOT Materials

MERLOT Materials provides access to a broad range of multi-discipline educational resources, some of which are available via open access. You can filter the results by Material Type, to show only open access textbooks.

OASIS

Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool for open content which covers a range of subject areas.

OER Commons

OER Commons is an online repository for learning resources. It provides access to a broad range of multi-discipline Open Educational Resources including textbooks.

Online Books Page

The Online Books Page provides an index to books which are freely accessible.

Open Research Library

The Open Research Library (ORL) provides access to Open Access books from around the world and covers a range of subject categories.  

OpenStax

OpenStax publish openly licensed college textbooks that are freely available online.

Open Textbook Library

The Open Textbook Library provides free access to textbooks across a range of subject areas

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is an online library of free e-books.

Springer Nature

Springer Nature publishes open access books across a wide range of areas in science, technology, medicine, humanities and social sciences

UCL Press

UCL Press provides open access to monographs, edited collections and textbooks.

University of Westminster Press (UWP)

The University of Westminster Press (UWP) is a digital-first open access publisher of peer reviewed academic books, policy briefs and journals. Subject coverage includes: social sciences and humanities, science and technology, and media arts and design.

Journal Finder

Use Journal Finder to add useful electronic journal titles from Teesside University, to your reading lists. There are step by step instructions on how to do this available in the PDF below.

Cambridge University Press

Open access journals from Cambridge University Press.

CORE

CORE (COnnecting REpositories) provides open access to scholarly literature from around the world. 

Google Scholar

Google Scholar provides free access to some academic literature. Please note that not all content in Google Scholar is freely available.

MERLOT Materials

MERLOT Materials provides access to a broad range of multi-discipline educational resources, some of which are available via open access. You can filter the results by Material Type, to show only open access journal articles..

Springer Nature

Springer Nature publishes open access journal articles across a wide range of areas in science, technology, medicine, humanities and social sciences

University of Westminster Press (UWP)

The University of Westminster Press (UWP) is a digital-first open access publisher of peer reviewed academic books, policy briefs and journals. Subject coverage includes: social sciences and humanities, science and technology, and media arts and design.

Adding an Online Database

The library subscribes to a lot of useful online databases and you might find it useful to bookmark some of these on your reading list. Instructions on how to do this are in the PDF below.  You can see the full range of databases in the A-Z list or you can filter the list to show specific subject resources.

A-Z Databases Subject Filter

Box of Broadcasts (BoB)

BoB is Learning on Screen’s on demand TV and radio service for education. There is a series of instructional videos to help using BoB. Users will need to register when logging in to BoB for the first time, and then complete registration by clicking on the link in the verification email. Students will need to register in order to view any clips you bookmark on your reading lists. 

Instructions on how to bookmark videos from this site are below.

Ted Talks

TED is devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less).

Instructions on how to bookmark videos from this site are below.

YouTube

YouTube is home to lots of useful videos on a variety of topics.

Some useful education Channels on You Tube include:

Instructions on how to bookmark videos from this site are below.

NewsBank

Database which offers a comprehensive news collection. Most of the content from NewsBank is searchable in Discovery and it easier to bookmark articles that way. However, if you prefer, you can search the database separately and bookmark directly from NewsBank. Content also includes videos and podcasts.

Instructions on how to bookmark from this site are below.

PressReader

PressReader gives access to over 7000 newspapers and magazines.

Instructions on how to bookmark newspapers, magazines and articles from this site are below.

Example Reading List with Online Resources

Example Online Only List in RLO

Click the image below to see an example of a reading list which only contains online material, utilising the resources listed above.

Screenshot of an online only reading list in RLO

Broken Links

Broken Links

Adding additional e-resources to your list, may bring up the concern of broken links. However, Reading Lists Online have a broken links reporting system which students can use.

Students can just click on the 3 dots, next to the View Online button and select Report Broken Link.

3 dot menu with broken link option
 
They can report the broken link anonymously, or they can provide their details and get notified when the link has been updated. Clicking on Report sends the details to the Library.

Report broken link form

The reports will then be picked up by the Library who will investigate.