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Product and Service Update – February 2017

Natalie Naik

Welcome to the February edition of the Talis Product and Services Update.

Product Update Summary

We would like to update you on the progress of some of our key product development themes; click here to remind yourself of the Talis development focus.

Talis Insight Asia- Pacific 2017

A great few days in Brisbane, here are just some of the highlights we recommend taking time out to view:

See the full content of the two days – Talis Insight Asia-Pacific 2017

Starting the new semester or academic year off on the right foot

At this time of year, you’ll no doubt be experiencing a high number of requests for resources and/or digitisations, as well as planning your engagement strategies and training activities for your academic, library and other support staff.  It’s a busy time all round, but planning and performance now will show benefit in the long run.  For example:

  • Support documentation – whether they’re internal or external instructions and support documentation, it’s important with the amount of new and returning staff that these documents are available, reliable and up-to-date.
  • Internal workflows – If your workflows have or are being changed from last year, to avoid confusion in your staff don’t forget to update your settings in Talis Aspire Digitised Content (TADC), or talk to us about updating your Reviews workflow in Talis Aspire Reading Lists (TARL).

As always if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to raise a support ticket.

Reviews 2.0 Beta update

We announced this week that we are moving reviews out of beta and into your normal Talis Aspire workflows. A member of the Services Team will contact each university via Support to plan the migration steps with you. Each university is using reviews in a slightly different way, hence why we are planning to contact you individually to discuss your next steps and timeline.  If you have any questions around reviews, then do raise a support ticket and you can view the FAQ’s here

Making changes at your university?

Please do remember to tell us if you plan to make changes to any of the systems we integrate with, such as Library Management Systems, OPAC, or Identity Providers.  A change to these without speaking to us first may cause issues with the use of the Talis Aspire Reading Lists and Talis Aspire Digitised Content.  Giving us notice of these changes means we can discuss the process and options, schedule consultancy or support if required so there is no impact to your student, academic, or library colleague users.

CLA (UK)

We are currently working to implement the necessary enhancements to Talis Aspire Digitised Content to enable changes to the reporting as per the new HE License. We will be working to contact customers in the next few weeks to explain what we are doing and impact on your reporting. As we release changes, we will keep you updated; in the meantime, please rest assured that Talis Aspire Digitised Content remains fully compliant, and will support the evolution in reporting that CLA have now put in place.

Releases of interest

As you know, Talis is agile in our development, which means we make multiple small releases and updates to our products on a weekly basis.  This allows us to release improvements as they are ready, while maintaining our 99.99% uptime throughout 2016.  We have implemented a Product Update page where you can view all release information including all improvements or fixes released in Talis Aspire.  This site is available from the top navigation bar on the Talis Support site.  Releases that you may be particularly interested in are:

  • We have released a change that should fix the behaviour you were seeing when links were reverting to DOI when editing bookmarks preferred Online Resource link.
  • Customers can now choose which link is preferred when there are multiple link types in an Article. You can choose from Web Address, DOI and Open URL, in any order. For example, if you want web addresses to be preferred and never DOIs, then a preference order of “Web Address, Open URL” can be configured. The default order is DOI, Web Address and Open URL. Would you like us to set a specific order? Please raise a support request. The support article How the Online Resource button works has been updated
  • Ris export now contains edition and editor information
  • We have now improved Quick Add so it directly links held items to the catalogue and displays availability, previously this was only linked following a book metadata refresh.
  • When adding or editing page numbers in the edit metadata screen we have now corrected the display to show Page start and Page end in a logical order, previously defaulted to alphabetic display.

Community Contributions

We are launching a new section on our support.talis.com homepage called Community Contributions. We already have a wealth of community contributed webinars listed there, but we are now looking for other sorts of best practice or top tips you wish to share. These may be small hints regarding the bookmarking from a particularly tricky resource, or reporting filters or google analytics that prove very useful for a monthly task. If have something you wish to share with others, then please let us know by raising a support ticket.

Support articles of interest

Bookmarking

Talis Aspire Reading Lists now supports bookmarking from over 230 different sources. You can see the full list of bookmarks that Talis supports in the following article, where can I bookmark from?

This month, we have updated several existing recognisers and added new recognisers for the following sites:

  • SUNCAT (Serials Union Catalogue for the UK)
  • Medical Journal of Australia (MJA)
  • Psychiatry Online

If you bookmark from a site and would like to see improvements, please raise a support ticket.

Developer Community

February’s developer community newsletter looking towards summer projects and using our JSON ‘v2’ APIs to build your own integrations. Don’t miss out on next month’s newsletter. To register to join our developer community, please email consulting@talis.com.

Upcoming webinars

If there is anything you would like to learn more about, or you have something you wish to share with others, then please let us know by raising a support ticket.  Don’t forget to check our recordings of previously held webinars.

EUROPE:  Tim Hodson, Technical Consultant at Talis, talks through the implementation of Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) to integrate Talis Aspire reading lists to your University Learning Management System. Tim will also be able to answer any questions you have to make your integration a success!

Wednesday 8th March at 2pm GMT Sign up here

We recommend you read our related support article on Talis support article on LTI integration ahead of the Webinar, this will enable you to take the opportunity to ask further questions on the day.

APAC:  As APAC are busy with the start of Semester one in March APAC Webinars will start from April. These are currently being planned and will be announced on our website and via this update once dates are confirmed.

Things to think about

Would you like to organise a review with the Talis team? This would be focusing on getting the most from Talis Aspire and ensuring Talis Aspire is working as efficiently as possible for your university. Please email Alison Spencer (as@talis.com) to organise a time that works for you and your team to have a call.

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