Allow file uploads to be visible to students regardless of citation status
Currently a citation has to be ‘Complete’ for an uploaded file to be visible to students.
We use 'Course Reserves Automatic Statuses' to change citation statuses from 'Complete' if tags or metadata are edited. This means that students won't be able to view a file if a tutor edits or tags the citation. Library staff can set citations back to complete but are only available in Mon-Fri, 9-5, so students may lose access for several days at a weekend.
We're currently trialling the 'Social readings' feature where students can highlight and add comments to documents, but the risk of students not having stable access to the PDF will affect whether we make this feature available for all staff to use.
We’d like to be able to configure citations so that uploaded files are visible at any status.
This is available in the November 2023 release, developed as part of the NERS enhancement cycle.
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Deborah Fitchett commented
(Just a note to emphasise that if this is implemented it would have to be library-configurable, not default behaviour: at my own library we rely on files being invisible unless the citation is Complete in order to enforce copyright compliance. Perhaps a parameter where libraries could specify a list of statuses which allow the file to be visible, then a library that needs to deal with both Lorna's situation and ours could configure it to work with both cases.)