More Like What Am I Doing With My Life,

After a lovely relaxng reading week, it's back to the joys of lectures and essays - oh the joys! - but I really have to point out that rather than take a few simple steps to make life a little easier for students, it seems universities - or mine at least - are hellbent on making it almost impossible to get through an assignment.

In the last three years, I can't actually remember the amount of times I've had to do an emergency Amazon order just to finish a peice of coursework, because the library has all of about three copies of a key text and they've all be taken out weeks prior to the assignment.

That is, of course, if you can even find the bokks of the reading list.

This term, I've found that half of the things given to me on the reading lists by the lecturers aren't even in the library. Some have been ordered, and are 'on their way' or it's taken me forever to find the relevant peice in the online journal archive we're allowed to access, but surely it would be much easier if - when writing or ammending these reading lists - the lecturers put the classmark for the book in the library, or provided the link for the online database! It would make things much simpler!

Also, it would help if they alerted the library that 30 students were going to need access to that one book, so they could put it onto reference only, or even, God forbid, order a couple more copies!

And lastly, this one will never happen because it would make life far too easy, but it was awesome at my sixth form. Have a system that allows you to search through the chapters of the book using the library catalogue. I took out six books for my last essay - most were off the readign list - and three had no real relevance to the essay I was writing. I mean, what is the point of my lugging them home and spending a couple of hours trying to find something relevant when it's just not there.

There are so many ways to improve search facilities, like just havign key word tags, or even just module tagging the books (putting a list of module codes that said text would be relevant for on it's information page) but let's face it, it's not going to change - any - time - soon.