Meet Sarah and Joe from University College of Birmingham on 20th of November

Sarah Bagnall and Joe Foley are getting ready to speak at our Autumn Open Day in Birmingham. I invited them to share a little about them and what we might hope to hear from them in November.

Here is a short QnA with Sarah and Joe:

Please introduce yourself and tell us about your role at the University of College Birmingham.
We’re Sarah and Joe, and our primary job is enquiry support within the Library, and we’ve also been involved with the lion’s share of the administrative support for Talis Aspire.

How do you/the team you work with support teaching and learning at your institution?
The Subject Librarians attend support seminars within their schools, we support lecturers with use of new Library technology such as Talis Aspire, and liaise with them regarding resource provision.

What are the key benefits for the University College Birmingham, realised, so far, from using Talis Aspire Reading Lists and Digitised content.
The key benefit is the enhancement of the learning process for the student, improving their awareness and ease of access to the online resources available to them.  From a Library perspective it increases our visibility of the resources being recommended to the students which has a positive impact on the ordering process.  The ease of editing gives a greater flexibility for the academic staff to update their resource lists for the benefit of the students.

What are your/your teams objectives within the library over the next 12 months? 
The Library objective for Talis Aspire over the next 12 months is to continue the ‘handover’ process to the academic staff, transferring perceived ownership of reading lists from the Library to the academics, whilst remaining available for troubleshooting and training.

Briefly, what can people expect to hear from you on the 20th November, at the Talis Open day?
They can expect to hear our reasons for adopting, how we built our business case, early implementation (including assistance on the IT side), initial strategies including what worked and what didn’t, as well as more detailed plans for the future.

I would like to thank both Sarah and Joe for taking the time to send me their responses. You can hear more from them at our General Open Day at Birmingham on 20th November.

Will you be joining us in Birmingham? Do you have any specific questions or areas you would like to hear from Sarah or Joe about? Do let us know in your comments.

Image credit: Michael Warren