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Academic Staff Support Guide: Reading lists & Ordering Resources

Mae'r dudalen hon hefyd ar gael yn Gymraeg

Reading lists

iFind Reading Logo

Swansea University uses a system called iFind Reading which links in with Canvas to make it easy for students to find resources on their Reading Lists. It also displays in the module catalogue and module maintenance.

The guide below takes you through creating a reading list. We also have a detailed iFind Reading library guide with additional information on how to use the Reading List software, as well as guidance on how to make your reading lists more inclusive, engaging, and diverse.

Request Digitised Content for Teaching

Digitisation Service

Copyright Licensing Agency logo

Request digitisation of chapters, articles, and extracts for iFind Reading lists and Canvas. To comply with the University's Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) Higher Education Licence, course instructors must not upload self-scanned copies of published content to Canvas or iFind Reading.

Find out more

 

Suggesting a Book or Journal Title for our Library Collection

Suggesting a Book title for our Library Collection

The Library encourages academics to suggest titles to add to our Library's collection.  Many of the titles are ordered to support active reading lists which are loaded into our reading list software - iFindReading. 

The Library's collection policy is to order an e-book version as the preferred format.  The Library asks that you add items to your reading lists at least 10 weeks before they are needed in order to allow time for procurement and processing.  Please contact your subject team (contacts in the above Subject Team Contacts tab) if you need advice on selection of resources.

Whilst we make every effort to find an electronic version, we find that some books are simply not available electronically, or not available for libraries to buy, even when a version is available for an individual to use.  Some e-book are also very expensive and so we must be mindful of budgetary constraints.  The are many different licensing models too, and we need to take these into consideration when purchasing.

This access model tends to be very expensive, and because the University loses access to the resource after the time period of the purchase, we have to consider the sustainability of the model carefully.

Suggesting a Journal title for our Library Collection

You can suggest a journal to your Academic Liaison Librarian at any time for consideration. Please note that funds are limited.  If you only want one or two articles from a journal for your personal research, consider ordering from Document Supply.

Using AV Material for online teaching

Take a risk managed approach to using AV material 

A combination of CDPA Section 32 & Section 34 may offer the flexibility to defend screening digital works online in a restricted VLE (Canvas) for a limited timeframe. This would be restricted to registered student module groups in support of learning and teaching activities.This activity would not extend to any other circumstances.

Please allow a minimum of 21 days if requesting support for screening digital works online in Canvas from DVD.

Further information is available from the Copyright Guide.

Copyright Designs & Patents Act 1988 (CDPA)
S.32 Illustration for Instruction
S.34 Performing, playing or showing work in course of activities of educational establishment

Finding Open Resources

Using repositories as sources of supply for free online access to scholarly publications.

Increasingly full-text peer reviewed research articles are available through institutional and subject repositories. Open access resources can be used to find published information swiftly and often without cost. Open access material includes journal articles, scholarly and scientific monographs, educational resources, metadata, digitised material and research data.

Search via:

  • Cronfa - Swansea University institutional repository
  • Cronfa E-Theses - Swansea University open access theses
  • Swansea Vision Swansea University Computer Vision & Machine Learning Group

  • African Journals Online provides access to scholarly research publications from Africa
  • arXiV - Open access research papers in physics and related disciplines. This is a subject pre-print service
  • BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search) - Access over 120 million documents from 6000+ sources. >60% of indexed full text documents are available via open access
  • BioImage Archive  The BioImage Archive is a public data resource that archives and makes available biological image data, of all scales, from molecules to entire organisms. A central archive promotes open data, provides reference data for the research community and allows for new scientific discoveries to be made with existing data across all imaging modalities and accelerates the development of new and improved image-analysis methods. 
  • bioRxiv - This is a subject pre-print service for Biology
  • CogPrints – Self-archived papers in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics, Philosophy, Biology
  • CORE - Aggregating the world’s largest collection of open access research papers
  • DOAB - Discover Open Access books
  • DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals
  • Europe PMC - Search worldwide, life-sciences literature
  • HathiTrust Digital Library - Search a collection of millions of digitised titles from Libraries worldwide
  • NORA - NERC Open Research Archive
  • PhilArchive - The largest open access e-print archive in philosophy. Formerly known as the PhilPapers Archive, it is built on and integrated with the PhilPapers database.
  • PhilSci Archive - Pre-print  service for the Philosophy of Science 
  • PubMed - Free MEDLINE clinical science and medicine database. Some free articles available
  • redalyc.org provides access to research published across Latin America and the Caribbean
  • RePEc – Research Papers in Economics
  • SocArXiv - open Archive of the Social Sciences. This is a subject pre-print service
  • SSRN -  An interdisciplinary service
  • Unpaywall - An open database for free scholarly articles. Get an Add-on for your browser to automatically check for legal open access articles

Disciplinary and multi disciplinary repositories

  • OAD - An extensive list of OA disciplinary repositories or subject repositories is available via the Open Access Directory (OAD) site.

Pre-Print Servers
Preprint manuscripts are the Author's Original Manuscript (AOM) before journal peer-review. There are many online subject pre-print repositories which contain early versions of research articles. Some academic disciplines commonly use preprint repositories, e.g ArXiv, SocArXiv etc.

Open Access Books
DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books: Search for full text books.

OAPEN: OA Books Toolkit

Open Educational Resources

  • OER Commons is a high quality public digital library providing content from a worldwide community of educators.
  • MERLOT The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers. View the YouTube introduction.

Swansea University Open Research Data

  • Zenodo for the Swansea University Open Research Data Community