Creating reading lists for university students

From IntraLibrary

by Emma Tonkin and Debra Hiom

Carla is a teacher at university, and she is looking to develop a reading list to support a first year undergraduate course on the history of psychology. She would like to find resources of guaranteed quality, so she goes to the Intute catalogue. At first she browses through the psychology subject section, and then finds an interesting resource. There is a link next to the resource details labelled 'more on this topic'; she clicks on it, and is given a list of articles which are related in terms of both theme, level and subject matter. Although she does not know it, this is generated using the metadata contained within the Intute catalogue (subject headings and level information) and services such as term extraction to determine the subject matter of the resources and a thesaurus of terms.