To make your list more helpful to students, consider the following enhancements:

1. Easy to Access: Ensure access via the Course Materials+ tool in ICON.

2. Laid Out: Use section headings to indicate when and what students are expected to read. Organize lists by theme, week, lecture, or seminar topics.

3. Prioritized and Annotated:

   • Tags: Use Essential, Recommended, and Optional tags to help students prioritize their reading and manage their time.
   • Loan Periods: For physical items on reserve, use tags like 1-Day, 2-Hour, 3-Day, or 4-Hour.
   • Notes: Add notes to highlight relevant chapters, pages, or excerpts, and provide other useful information.
   • Due Dates: Include due dates when necessary.

4. Up to Date: Regularly review lists with Course Reserve Library staff to identify and fix issues like broken links and ensure resource availability. This keeps students confident that their lists are current.

5. Realistic:

   • Consider the volume of resources students can reasonably engage with during the course.
   • Ensure essential materials are accessible.
   • Create separate bibliographies using Course Materials+ to encourage further exploration and research.
   • Use the student view to confirm that all materials are visible and accessible. If you see "Library processing" on a resource, it is not viewable to students. Contact lib-res@uiowa.edu for assistance.
   • There are many instructors with reading lists and streaming requests, so please be mindful of the number of requests you are making. We want all our students to have equal access to resources and must be considerate of other instruction material needs. 

By implementing these strategies, your list will be more organized, accessible, and useful for all students.

• Use the "View list as a student" feature to ensure students can view and access everything they're assigned.
• TIP: If you see "Library processing" on any resource item, it is not visible to the students even if the list is published.

Additional Tips:

1. Enhance Readability: Add articles using the "Search the Library" feature or directly from InfoHawk+ instead of uploading PDF files. This approach increases the readability of electronic texts for students.

2. Collaborate with Librarians: Work with your librarian or liaison to create a course-specific guide that can be integrated into ICON. These guides can help students find additional resources independently and serve as tools for teaching research skills, such as evaluating sources and citing references.

3. Utilize CM+ Features: By clicking on the question mark (?) icon in the top right corner of your page, you can access articles or videos that provide information about the additional benefits of using Course Materials+ (CM+).

Encourage student engagement Video length: 03:14 minutes

Monitor student usage Video length: 01:56 minutes

The list isn't visible
If students can't see the list, ensure it is 1) published, and 2) has the correct start and end dates set. Test to see if the list is visible using the “View list as student” feature.

The link to resource isn't working
If an electronic resource can’t be accessed, clear the browser’s cache (and/or try another browser). If it still doesn’t work, mark the link as broken. That will alert library staff who will work to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. In the meantime, locate the resource in InfoHawk+ to see if it is available from an alternative database or as a physical version.

Students report a book isn't on the Course Reserves shelf
Did you add a loan period tag to the book in your list? If not, do that ASAP.
Perhaps the loan period time is too long so not all students are getting a turn with the material. Could some parts of the book be digitized? Could the loan period be altered? Have you warned students that the material on reserve will be harder to come by the closer it gets to test time? They might want to check it out early and make a scanned copy of important pieces.

Library Search isn't finding resource
If the Library Search option isn't finding an item that you know the library owns, add it with an alternate method:

• Directly from InfoHawk+

• Directly from an online database that has the resource using the “Cite It!” bookmarklet

Cite It! bookmarklet generates a link without the proxy URL
When using "Cite It!", double-check that the link to the resource includes the proxy server address in the URL. If you don't see the proxy in the URL, add it using the proxy link generator. Contact your subject librarian for assistance.