New restricted loan/core text collection

The "old" restricted loan team felt for some time that they commited a large amount of time and effort into the maintenance of the collection but that it is relatively little used by students and lecturing staff despite being a very useful resource. (Lecturers that do make use of the collection and recommend it to their students find it very valuable and good use is made of their resources.)

With the help of the Med team we tried to find out why the collection wasn’t used as extensively as we hoped.

By questioning both students and staff on their opinions we realised that one of the reasons it was little used was that the very name restricted loan had a very negative connotation.

As all the material in the collection is by definition " recommended reading" we thought this most accurately described the collection and a simple name change would both identify and promote the collection.

I would like to encourage use of the collection in a lively creative way and would like to encourage lecturing staff to provide us with their reading lists through their information officers so that we can provide the students with a meaningful service.

As Jeremy is keen to have a core text collection I think this is a good time to look at the whole use of the collection and what it should contain.

I think even within the one collection we could identify different usage of materials. Perhaps core texts could be issued for 24 hours and the old restricted loan materials which have been recommended for particular topics should continue to be issued for a shorter time period. From previous experience I would favour something like 3 hours from the time of issue but also include a booking element to help organised students plan their study.

Changes like these would need system amendments - do we still have to rely on Talis for these or can there be a special LIS prioject to make these changes?

We also need to look at how this all links in with e-provision, e-books and ERL

Rather a lot to think about!