Hi everyone! I’m Bethany, a second year Business with Marketing student at the University of Edinburgh, and I am now almost nearing the end of my 10-week Resource Lists Internship with ISG. Joining the LLS Resource List team in the Main Library over the summer has been an invaluable experience, gaining insight into the inner workings of the library itself and the many steps taken by different LLS teams to ensure that resources are accessible and available to all students across the University.
Before this internship I had no idea how much work was involved in creating resource lists, let alone the efforts of the Acquisitions, E-reserve, and Cataloguing teams to gather and organise all the materials needed for students. As the name suggests, resource lists are compilations of all the resources (e.g., books, journals, articles, videos) that students are asked to engage with for a course they are partaking in, and my main responsibility has been creating and reviewing these lists.
Making a List
Each year, the Resource List team receives hundreds of lists from Course Organisers (COs) who either want us to review an existing list or create one from scratch. We use a platform called Leganto to create and manage these lists, which is the same platform students use to view them once finalised.
The process begins by ensuring that all the items requested by the CO are available in DiscoverEd, then adding them to the list, organising them by week, and tagging them by priority. These tags help students identify whether a reading is essential, recommended, or further reading. They’re also crucial when determining how many copies (either e-books or print) to purchase. Purchases are made through Alma, a more complicated platform that I had to get used to at the start of my internship.
Ensuring that all resources are accessible before the next semester starts is no small feat—especially when some lists contain hundreds of citations. For example, the longest list we encountered had 960 citations (luckily, I was not the one assigned to that list)! Checking every link, verifying copyright compliance, and submitting purchase requests can be incredibly time-consuming, but it’s crucial to making sure everything’s ready for students in time.
Reflections
Over the course of the summer, I believe this internship has helped me develop many new skills and provided valuable experience in a 9-to-5 office environment, which was entirely new for me. Although I encountered challenges, such as learning how to handle various issues and small details, remembering numerous procedures, and constantly adapting to new tasks — working alongside the other three Resource List Interns (Madi, Livia, and Ci Ci) made these challenges feel far less overwhelming. Together we were able to discuss our issues informally and help each other to stay motivated. As well as having each other for help, each of us interns were assigned a ‘buddy’ (a full-time member of staff) that checked over our lists and were on hand to answer any questions we had. Personally, I think I would have been lost without my buddy Ashley, at least for the first month anyway! Our work as interns over the summer has contributed to the team’s success in completing semester one lists on time, and I hope that we eased a burden for the team, allowing them to focus on other important tasks. Now that my journey is coming to an end and I will soon be back at Uni, one thing I can say for certain is that I will never underappreciate a resource list again – it turns out they don’t just appear out of thin air after all!
