University of Birmingham, winner of the Talis Award for Excellence in Implementation and Management
The Talis Award for Excellence in Implementation and Management was to highlight the good work our customers do during their early days of using Talis Aspire. This award looked for those that have established clear aim and objectives, created successful workflows and have put in place a firm foundation for future rollout across their university. The University of Birmingham stood out as the winner of this award. They have been a Talis customer coming up to a year now and in that short time have shown fantastic progress, with an organised and efficient approach.
From the very first call we had with Birmingham to start off the process, they had clear goals and project outlines of what they wanted to achieve and when. There was a clear project team in place to work through the different aspects of implementation and if somebody was not on the project team they knew who to contact in the different departments.
Laura Unwin, Support Consultant at Talis, spent two days onsite with the Project team and wider library team at the beginning of September 2015. This was a great two days and really helped the library to see the progress that they had made, and allowed time for discussion and questions around processes and the way in which the systems worked.
A common challenge for the library team is to get buy-in from academics. In the University of Birmingham’s case, a big driver was their LTI integration with Canvas. They were the first institution in the UK to do this and assigned a Project Manager to help run this smoothly. You can watch the webinar with Ann-Marie James and Steve Watts for more information on this project. In the last year they have seen over 7,500 referrals from the module pages on canvas to Talis Aspire Reading Lists.
The University of Birmingham’s focus now is on rolling out to the wider university and engaging academics to create and use their reading lists. This is a big challenge that all universities face but with the solid ground work that Birmingham have established, they are in a good position to move this forward. Their top 3 viewed lists this year are International Business, Geographies of Children and Young People and New World Orders? Literature after 1945 which shows a varied use across departments.
It is good to note as well that even after a university has implemented the the scope of improvements and finding efficiencies does not end there. Talis are onsite in June to deliver a Business Process Review focusing on acquisitions and how changes can be made to make this process more streamlined across all stakeholders in the acquisition of books from reading lists.
Congratulations to the University of Birmingham on your success and we look forward to seeing how you develop and grow in your partnership with us using Talis Aspire.
