A recap: Talis Insight Asia-Pacific 2017

On the 2nd and 3rd of February, we held our annual conference at the Ship Inn in Brisbane, Australia, welcoming 42 attendees in Higher Education from across the Asia-Pacific region.

On the first day, we kicked off with a keynote from Sue Hutley, Director of Library Services, Queensland University of Technology titled Breaking barriers: Collaboration and connectedness in a global community. This talk was centered around themes of ‘Connectedness’, ‘Access’, ‘Collaboration’ and ‘Commitment’. 

Following Sue, we heard from Kim Tairi, University Librarian from the Auckland University of Technology who guided us through their Talis Aspire implementation experience, sharing videos from academics in the pilot group on their thoughts. Kim encouraged us to think about the opportunities and challenges for 2017 and how we might approach them from the viewpoint of a ‘Digital Citizen’. Next, we heard from Dr Simon Bedford, Senior Lecturer at the University of Wollongong who led us through the ‘Learning Analytics journey @ UOW’.

After lunch on the veranda, the afternoon sessions began with Anne Kealley, CEO of CAUDIT. Anne added a great perspective, talking us through ‘trends in higher education in Australia and New Zealand through the eyes of the CIO’. It was great to hear about the ‘top 10 issues’ report in more detail and get a holistic view of what is affecting Higher Education across the whole region.

Our Talis keynote was delivered by Keji Adedeji, Product Manager at Talis who talked us through what we have been working on and what’s to come from Talis. We will be uploading this shortly, so watch this space for more information.

We finished an interesting day of talks with a discussion panel hosted by Alison Spencer, Head of Services at Talis. It was great to share thoughts based on what we had learnt in the day, and it was a great opportunity for the Talis team to hear your concerns and ideas.

On the second day, we got to hear more from the Talis Aspire community and it was brilliant to hear how they were getting on, what they had achieved with Talis and their plans for the future.


From Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) we heard from Marcus Harvey, Academic Support Manager and Matthew Arrowsmith, Client Services Coordinator, whose presentation was all about ‘Carrots and Sticks’. They told us what happened at VUW when Talis Aspire was introduced to an academic environment, they success they had seen and the lessons they learned.

In the next presentation, Susan Tegg and Karen Walsh from Griffith University explored academic adoption: Activities to underpin adoption, academic adoption strategies, change management and communication strategies. This was followed by Project Manager at Queensland University of Technology, Nicole Healy’s presentation with the inspiring title “We can change the world: one project at a time”. She talked us through where they are with the project now, their reflections on implementing Talis Aspire, and lessons learnt along the way.

To finish off a full morning of presentations, Head of Teaching and Learning at Talis, Rodney Tamblyn delivered a session on “Achieving learning and teaching impact with Talis”.

After lunch, Craig Milne, Manager of Scholarly Resource Services at Griffith University talked about ‘Using Reading List data to support and drive resource strategies’, exploring how data was used to inform strategy and how they will continue to do this into 2017. To round off the event, Caroline Ondracek, Senior coordinator, Curricular Services (library), at La Trobe University presented us with, “Linking subject coordinators with Reading Lists @ La Trobe”, explaining their ‘two sides of the same coin’: content and access, and learning and teaching. She explored how they manage reading lists and how they work with the academics to ensure success.

We had a brilliant two days of tweeting, listening and discussing. Thank you to our speakers and attendees for being part of the event and making it a success.