How to engage academics with Talis Aspire: advice from a University of Birmingham librarian
One of the most common challenges we hear from our customers is engaging academics. Their response to the system varies greatly, some are extremely enthusiastic, and others need a little more time to see the real benefits. This can be a bigger challenge when you need to engage a whole department with the system.
The University of Birmingham found that their law department had reservations about starting to use Talis Aspire and that the benefits weren’t clear to them. Subject Advisor for the College of Arts & Law, Lisa Anderson made it her mission to change their minds, keen to help show them the same positives that she saw in the system. She joined us on a webinar to share the challenges she faced and how she found a way to overcome it.
Laura Unwin, Support Consultant at Talis hosted the webinar. Here’s what Laura had to say:
The University of Birmingham have been using Talis Aspire for a year and have faced the challenge as many do of engaging academic departments who are already time pressured. Lisa Anderson, Subject Advisor for the College of Arts & Law joined us to give an insight into how she has approached the rolling out of reading lists with the Law School. It was great to have Lisa share some of those challenges and fears not only from the department but also from herself as a Subject Advisor and how she has overcome those.
After a few library organised sessions, Lisa knew that it would be an uphill struggle from the offset, with the Head of Education also requiring a little convincing. One of her biggest pieces of advice was to see it from their perspective and pull out the benefits that would make the most sense to them. She found that showing them how the Digitised Content module worked was a great way to convince them as this was the area that would save them the most time.
Watch the webinar below to hear how Lisa won over her law academics and hear some of her great tips:
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Find this webinar useful? You may also be interested in Simon Thomson’s talk from Talis Insight Europe 2016 on “Engaging academics in digital discourse”.
What is your biggest obstacle to academic engagement? Here are tips from @UoBLibServices: https://t.co/XIkuayC2Qv
— Talis (@talis) September 26, 2016
