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Pilots Streaming Media with Music Department

This semester the ZSR Library has implemented several new features in our course reserve system. The enhanced system allows easier access to reserves lists and enables direct links to reserves pages from external systems such as Blackboard. To access the URL for your reserves page, go to the Catalog, click on the reserves tab, find a course and click on the ‘View List’ button. Copy the URL from the location bar on the resulting web page and paste it into Blackboard, your syllabus, or local website.

This new site links students directly to course reserves and electronic copies of articles, and allows sorting of results by author and call number in addition to title. Another new feature of the system is support for RSS feeds. RSS represents a different way of displaying web page data so that faculty and students can view the results in an RSS aggregator such as Bloglines. The benefit of using an RSS subscription over the regular web page is that students can now have their reserve readings ‘pushed’ to them on a regular basis rather than having to visit the reserves page throughout the semester to obtain the current week’s readings.

The library is currently working with faculty member Patricia Dixon in the Music Department on a pilot project involving weekly delivery of electronic reserves using this method. We are providing streaming music access for the students in her Latin American Music class. The library worked with Professor Dixon and Instructional Technology Consultant Jolie Tingen to digitize and convert listening assignments to streaming audio files which have been secured and made available via the library reserves system. By working from Professor Dixon’s syllabus, the library was able to add the class date information to our reserves database, enabling students to sort by class date and view just the reserves assignment for a particular class.

To see the system in action, visit the course reserves page and find the reserve list for Dixon, Patricia – Music 210. On this page, students can sort the assignments by class date and limit the view to the current assignments. By clicking on one of the RSS feed links at the top of the page, students get a feed that can be included in their favorite aggregator. We are looking to expand this pilot project in the spring. If you would like to include the class date information with your reserves materials for spring semester, have comments/suggestions, or want more information on how to use RSS feeds, contact Mary Reeves.