Bridging the gap with reading lists Meeting the Reading Lists Challenge April 2014 Jon Knight Loughborough University IT Services

Bridging the gap with reading lists Loughborough Online Reading List System (LORLS) has been developed with several groups in mind: Students Academic staff Librarians Library assistants Departmental administrative staff

Bridging the gap with reading lists Now been running reading lists for over a decade. Lots of the features we put in for our existing user base are fairly mature. We have a large database of reading list information and APIs that allow us to access it. We wondered if there were other uses to which the data could be put?

Bridging the gap with reading lists One group of users we've not supported until now are prospective students. The University is keen to support prospective students more during the period between choosing Universities and turning up in October. Need to “improve conversion rate”. Librarians and departmental admissions staff do get asked, “What books will I need in my first year?”

Bridging the gap with reading lists For prospective students we don't necessarily know what combination of first year modules they will be on. The request for books may come from the prospective student themselves, or from family or supporters wishing to help buy books as gifts. Therefore we decided to see if we could extract the most likely “useful” books for Freshers based on the data we already had.

Bridging the gap with reading lists Wrote new CGI script that asks which department the student is thinking of joining. Uses the central University database to locate first year modules for that department. Then look in the LORLS database for each of those modules and find which books academics have marked as “essential” reading. Display result to end user, and offer to add them to other 3 rd party systems (eg Goodreads).

Bridging the gap with reading lists

One issue is that not all departments have academics that mark any first year readings as “essential”. This could be used as feedback to the department – it may indicate that academics need to consider if they should indicate essential works to their existing students. If there are no essential items we could pick other works based on popularity – we already look at loans in other parts of LORLS.

Bridging the gap with reading lists Prototype has been shown to library staff and liaison staff from academic departments. Positive response so far! Need to decide how to present it – do we give it straight to the prospective students or is it a tool that library staff and departmental admissions folk have to make their lives easier? Need to work out how we can tell if its helping the conversion rate of applicants to students.

Bridging the gap with reading lists Any questions?