Hi all

 

I’ve been doing a bit of advocacy on Aspire recently, and these sessions usually go swimmingly until the point where I mention that “anyone, anywhere can see your reading lists” and go on to say a bit about the benefits of students finding other lists from other institutions and vice versa.

 

Maybe it’s just Lancaster, or maybe it’s just the way I explain it, but the open nature of the reading lists is a major turn-off for many of our academics. So I just wanted to get clear in my head how non-lancaster people are likely to find our lists – I wasn’t sure for instance if Google crawls our tenancy – and how we persuade academics who say that my list is my intellectual property and I only want my students to see it.

 

Unless we tell everyone that their lists are being made public they don’t necessarily know this is the case, and we are being accused by some academics of rolling out this feature of the service ‘under the radar’. I know the list can be made private, but only the tenancy admin role can do that and there is nothing in the staff view to enable that to happen.

 

Sorry for sounding off, but if anyone has experienced this kind of push-back I’d be glad to know how you deal with it. In a demo session these arguments can derail the whole thing.

 

Thanks in advance,

Michael.

 

Michael Dunne | Assistant Librarian | The Library | Lancaster University

Lancaster | LA1 4YH | UK | +44(0)1524 592 701