The Reading Lists tool in Canvas allows you to create lists of resources for your courses, such as books, articles, and streaming media, including online resources and physical materials available through the libraries. Students will view your list within Canvas, where they will find all course materials in one place.

You may be more familiar with the term “course reserves” to describe library-owned required or recommended readings for your students. Reading Lists puts together all your course readings for the student in one list including library-owned physical materials, e-books or articles, links to open-source materials, and more.

The Canvas Reading Lists tool:

• Allows you to search the library catalog without leaving Canvas, and add resources to your Reading List with the click of a button
• Notifies the library when a physical item is added to your list and needs to be pulled and placed in the reserves section
• Allows students to access electronic books and media as soon as you add them
• Can be quickly accessed by students, who see all materials in one place, and can mark items as done to keep track of their progress
• Provides the option to easily copy a previous semester’s list to your current course if you want to use it again

If you have submitted a reserve list outside of Canvas, library staff will create and publish the Reading List for you and your students. You can then use the Reading List tool to make additions and edits if you wish.

Please note: By default, library staff members do not have any assigned roles in your Canvas site, but they do have access to the Reading Lists section of your Canvas site and can make changes as needed.

In some cases, you may wish to add a library staff member to your Canvas site in a Designer role, but this is only necessary if they will be working with you on modules other than Reading Lists, and you should discuss this with the library staff member before adding them in this role.