Reading List of the Week – The One With All the Reading Lists, Royal Holloway, University of London

Our Reading List of the Week is The One With All the Reading Lists, Royal Holloway, University of London.

To kick off their Reading List campaign, the team at Royal Holloway have created a fun reading list harking back to the 90s, to show off the best features the list.

In their screenshot below you can see their use of sections and subsections to organise and structure the list.

Within the list they have also used online resources, something that is highly recommended as it makes it easy for students to access items from any location.

The use of notes on the items is also particularly useful for students, allowing the academic to add context to the item, or drawing focus on a particular section.

There are also notes used as comments within the sections, helping the students to further navigate the list, or as shown below, add extra details, such as contact information.

Here’s what Matt Smith from the library team at Royal Holloway had to say:

“We are always looking for new and fun ways to engage students with the reading list system here at Royal Holloway. When we noticed (to our horror) that the local Vintage Market was full of 90’s clothing we thought we’d get into the resurgence of the decade that gave us Girl Power and Pokemon by setting up a training list themed on the 1990s. One of our reading list assistants, Michaela Jones, dove deep into the archives and immersed herself in the psyche of those who sported brightly-coloured shell suits and listened to novelty pop songs way-back-when. The resulting list is a fun introduction to the types of resource a student might encounter on a regular reading list, from articles about Tony Blair’s landslide victory in the 1997 general election to classic episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on BoB, with a few quizzes thrown in along the way.

It’s a 90s-tastic introduction to Talis and we’ve been using the list during training sessions and in our recent Reading List Week. Students seem to like it, even if they haven’t heard of half the things listed (groan)! “

This list is a great way of showing off what Talis Aspire Reading Lists can do, hopefully encouraging academics to use all the features available to make it as easy as possible for the students to engage with the materials.

Do you have a list you’d like to share? Send an email to rloftheweek@talis.com or tweet us the link, @Talis with the hashtag #ReadingListoftheweek