LibGuides: Reading List Guide: Structuring your list

Best practice

All the readings that you need to teach the module should be included in your reading list for your students to access. You can link items directly from the library catalogue (i.e., eBooks, journal articles), or from external resources, such websites, podcasts, blog posts, Youtube videos, and so on. In a nutshell, anything that is either part of the library’s catalogue, or lives online somewhere outside our catalogue and you deem it to be of educational value for your students, should be linked to your reading list.

Please add all readings and relevant materials to your reading list and avoid adding readings to your Canvas pages. Populating your reading list instead of your Canvas pages is aligned with the University’s Reading List Procedure and comes with considerable advantages:

Students can find all their weekly readings in one place with a simple click on the “Reading List” tab.

Readings lists are reviewed by the library before teaching even starts. This is to ensure that all readings are available in appropriate formats and sufficient quantities in order to facilitate your teaching and further enhance the learning experience of students.

Populating your reading list eliminates the manual effort required to create hyperlinks on Canvas as you can easily add everything that you need on your reading list with literally a couple of clicks.

Library advises that good practice would be not to exceed 150 items on a list and to use the list to focus on Essential Reading rather than creating an extensive bibliography

Structuring lists by sections

Use 'Sections' to organise your materials into any structure that suits your module teaching. When you are in your reading list, you will see the Add in the top left, click and select New Section towards end of the list.

When you add a New Section it will automatically be placed at the bottom of the list.
Once created sections can be moved either by dragging the section or by adding it to your clipboard and moving it to the appropriate area in the list
You will be prompted to give the section a title, e.g. 'Week 1'. The description is optional but can be used to give more context to the week.
Dates can be added to indicate when the section runs during the year. If the list rolls over to the next academic year these dates do not rollover
Click Add

Rearranging sections

You can easily move sections of your reading list around.

Make sure the section is collapsed, this will mean the items within it are not visible and the arrow next to the section name should be pointing to the right not down. Do this by clicking the title of the section.
With the section collapsed roll your cursor over the 6 dots to the left of the title. You can click and hold to drag and drop the section to any place in the list.
Then rename the sections, i.e. if you moved Week 1's readings to Week 9. By clicking on the 3 dots to the right of the section title and selecting Edit Section.

Editing or deleting sections

Click on the dotted menu icon next to items and sections on your reading list.
Click "edit" to edit the name of the sections.
Click "delete" to remove sections.

Essential and Further items

Essential or Further readings

Items are tagged as Essential or Further reading when they are created.

To change the tag:

Click on Full Details on the top right of an item.
Select the Item Actions tab.
Click the X next to the existing tag and select the alternative tag from the list.

Support

If you have any questions please email readinglists.lib@sussex.ac.uk.

Departmental sessions or drop-in clinics can be arranged on request.