An investigation into issues surrounding the production or adoption of a standard notation for reading lists in Cambridge

Huw Jones

Reading lists are the area in which academic workflows, student information needs and library services interact most directly. This project will investigate means of making reading lists more useful to undergraduates, libraries and other interested parties. Important strands are likely to be:

• investigation of existing solutions, technologies and standards
• consultation with academics, librarians and students
• development of a standard notation for the description of lists and resources, to include contextual as well as descriptive information
• based on this notation, development of a consistent way to build links from resources described on lists to library (and other) resources
• construction of a tool to harvest data from the lists into a central database for re-use
• design and implementation of interfaces and tools to allow interested parties to use this data to improve their services and working practices"