Talis News: Our August news update is here
Welcome to the August 2014 news update from Talis.
News
The last few months has been a busy time with several new universities joining the growing Talis community in the UK and Australia. New customers for the Reading Lists module include :-
- Griffith University
- Aberystwyth University
- University of Westminster
- University of Worcester
- University of Essex
- Pearson College
- St Mary’s University College
And new subscribers to the Digitised Content module include :-
- Griffith University
- University of Liverpool
- University of Derby
- Goldsmiths College
- University of Surrey
- University of Westminster
- University of Worcester
- Pearson College
- University of Glasgow
- York St John University
Our Services team is now working closely with customer teams on implementation, integration, training and data migration.
New Website
We have also been working on an overhaul of our web presence at www.talis.com, specifically to ensure it is consistent with our recent rebranding and that it is ‘responsive’, therefore easily usable on both smartphones and tablet devices as well as the web. We have also redesigned our blog where we will now post regularly on relevant topics, and where we welcome your comments on the new website.
UK Talis User Group Event
We hosted our largest event last month with the UK Talis Aspire User Group at the University of Leicester, with attendees from over 50 UK universities as well as welcome visitors from Monash and University of Queensland in Australia. All of the presentations are available here and a selection of the sessions were recorded with videos available here.
Prior to the event we challenged you to nominate the best reading list. We were pleased to receive 27 entries with the winner being the University of Edinburgh’s Charlie Farley, who developed the list to help train academics. Both the list author and nominator won £150 in Laterooms vouchers.
Australian Talis User Group
The Australian Talis Aspire User Group is being hosted by University of Queensland on Monday 25th and Tuesday 26th August. It will be attended by all six Australian universities who are currently using Talis Aspire and the agenda will cover everything from the development of Talis Aspire through to Academic Adoption. If you would like any further information on this, please contact Alison Kershaw.
Product News
Learning Management System integration
Our experience shows clearly that integration with Learning Management Systems is a major element of the successful adoption and enduring use of Talis Aspire Reading Lists. We therefore committed to create, support, and incrementally improve our own plug-ins for Moodle and Blackboard. Of course we also will help and encourage anyone who wishes to do the same and help share their developments. You can view the latest integration examples for Blackboard here and Moodle here and if you would like to learn more about this contact us.
Product Hour Webinars
For those of you who attended the Talis Aspire User Group, you will have heard the importance of attending the Talis Aspire Product Hours if you wish to keep up to date with all our ongoing developments. We hold webinars for both Reading Lists and Digitised Content, but If you can’t attend either of these live sessions, we record them and make them available here.
Latest Releases
Our development team has mostly been focused on a minor theme to enhance our infrastructure and ensure that user-specific content is always served and only accessible via secure SSL (HTTPS) encryption. This will ensure that user content is less vulnerable to external access or attacks. We are currently testing this core feature and will update customers with more information shortly. We are also working on small continuous improvements to both solutions, which include some CAL report improvement for our Australian customers and tighter integration with the British Library’s document supply service.
Services News
As we approach the new academic year in the UK, a number of universities have been working to ready themselves for the new year.
Training
Tailored team training – where universities have outlined where they see knowledge gaps and we have developed a custom training course to address this. Also as you start thinking about new academics and how you will get them up to speed with Talis Aspire, we have been delivering our training course to trainers to enable you to rollout your own training.
Consulting
Many customers, approaching the new academic year want to carry out a data audit on lists and content , so we are working to understand these bespoke requirements. Another common project is to migrate to a new Library Management System so please raise a support ticket so we can discuss how best we can support your migration plans.
As ever if you have any project work you would like to explore please either email Alison Kershaw, or raise a support case.
Talis Events
We will be hosting a series of Talis Open Days in the coming months. These include product demonstrations from existing customers, shared best practice sessions and detailed product updates. These days are particularly suited to new customers or those considering implementing a Reading List or Copyright Clearance solution. You can register for any of these free events here.
Meet us at these other events
- ALIA 2014 – 15th – 19th September 2014, Melbourne – Booth B38
- NAG September 2014
- Internet Librarian International 2014 – 21st and 22nd October 2014, London
- LIANZA 2014 – 12th – 15th October 2014, Auckland – Stand 53
- EDUCON Asia – 23-26 September – Booth 13
- Blackboard Users Conference, Jan 2015 – 6th and 7th, Durham
What’s next at Talis ?
At the recent Talis Aspire User Group event we described another area we are beginning to explore under a new project codenamed Lighthouse. This project will apply technology and learning analytics to enhance how digital resources are used in teaching and learning. Watch the presentation here.
And finally ….
Talis is a geographically distributed organisation with talented people in various parts of the UK, US and Australia. We use web based collaboration tools and apps to coordinate what we do every day, but sometimes, it is great to actually be in the same place at the same time …. so we captured that, just for the record.
