New to Talis Aspire: Askews & Holts enhanced acquisitions supplier integration
“The integration of Talis Aspire with Askews & Holts has been a huge time saver for the team completing Reviews”, Ted Spilsbury, Collections Support Librarian, University of the West of England, Bristol
Askews & Holts have been a Talis Partner for many years, providing links to their service through Talis Aspire Reviews in online reading lists. Talis are pleased to announce that by working together, we are able to offer more purchasing information, through a deeper integration. In this post, we explore the benefits of this deeper integration, hearing from pilot universities.
Following feedback on ways we could make your Talis Aspire experience more efficient, we have developed an integration with Askews & Holts, which allows deeper integration with their book supplier information. This integration will enable library practitioners to make acquisitions decisions quickly, accurately and efficiently by providing price and availability information from Askews & Holts directly in Talis Aspire Reviews. There is no need to leave Talis Aspire to check current ebook holdings and pricing for all formats, and the link allows the university to directly add the item to your order, saving time with a more streamlined workflow.
The integration provides the university with information unique to them as an Askews & Holts customer, including your current subscriptions taken, alternative formats available, alongside package and pricing information should you wish to purchase. When an acquisition decision can be made, the user is just one click away from accessing the exact item, format and model they wish to purchase, to add to their order.
We worked closely with Askews & Holts to develop this integration, also working with mutual customers, the University of the West of England, Bristol (UWE) and the University of Worcester to gather feedback from real-time testing to ensure a solution that delivers real benefit.
We ran a webinar to launch this enhancement, where we spoke to Ted Spilsbury, Collections Support Librarian from the University of the West of England, Bristol who demonstrated how the enhanced supplier integration works. You can watch the recording here.
“The integration of Talis Aspire with Askews & Holts has been a huge time saver for the team completing Reviews. We have a complicated PDA set-up with Askews & Holts, meaning that it is extremely important to see whether books are available to add to the PDA, which PDA profile they are already in, or whether the e-book has already been purchased. We are now able to quickly and easily see the PDA and licensing options for any given e-book on Askews & Holts, allowing us to add the book to a PDA+ profile or mark it as owned, at the click of a button. Our hope is that other suppliers will follow suit, allowing us to see the range of prices and licenses available across multiple platforms.” Ted Spilsbury, Collections Support Librarian, University of the West of England, Bristol
“The Reading Resources team have found the Askews & Holts integration in Talis Aspire a very useful addition to the Talis Aspire Reviews workflow. Allowing for ‘at a glance availability’ of ebooks and licence options for individual bookmarks via an ISBN match, plus we can view if a title has been added to our PDA+ profile and what has already been purchased. This has saved us time from externally checking licence models and order details during the workflow. We hope other suppliers will soon follow suit with this integration.” Kristy Millard, Reading Resources Co-ordinator – University of Worcester
The screenshots below illustrate how this looks in Talis Aspire. This is linked with your existing Askews & Holts service, so pricing is unique to your university set up.
“We know from our customers that library purchasing is heavily focused toward reading list content and along with Talis we wished to ease acquisition workflows wherever possible. Initial conversations with the Talis team highlighted an opportunity to do so and we readily committed the resources to the development.
Over the last few years, we have released a number of initiatives to help our customers including PDA+ which is now used extensively for selecting non-core reading titles and bespoke collection management tools which help manage away Turnaways and this initiative complemented our development strategy.
Talis Insight Europe 2018 provided a forum for the initial development to be discussed with mutual customers and additional ideas surfaced which both parties were quick to take on board. With input from testing partners at UWE and University of Worcester, we have been able to effectively prove and release the development and we are grateful to them for their support.
The final outcome of our collaboration with Talis, is a great example of what can be achieved when suppliers work closely together to provide our mutual customers with practical solutions to day to day challenges”. Jaqui Holborn, Academic Development Co-ordinator, Askews & Holts Library Services.
“Talis were pleased to be working with a responsive development partner like Askews & Holts who were just as keen as we were to help improve acquisitions processes for our mutual customers. It was recognised that jumping from one interface to another to locate a price or detail of current ebook profiles wasn’t a good use of time, and if we could get that information in one place, it would increase efficiency and ease of use.
Talis really appreciate the time and effort it takes to be a testing or beta partner, but in making that commitment you can help shape features early in the development process, ensuring they work well for your institution and the wider community. Thanks to Ted Spilsbury and Rhiannon Hawkins from UWE and Kristy Millard from the University of Worcester for your input and feedback ” Zena Amos, Continuous Improvement Product Analyst, Talis
If you are a Talis Aspire and Askews & Holts user, we will have raised a support ticket for you the highlight the next action that will be taken. If you have any further questions, please respond to the ticket.
Want to see other suppliers provide similar integrations? We are keen on further improving the Talis Aspire experience for all of our universities, however, this is not a project we can work on alone. If you would like to see an integration like this with another of your booksellers, please reach out to your providers to ask them to consider a deeper integration, and put them in touch with Zena Amos at za@talis.com.
If you would like to find out more about this integration or would like to inquire about other possible integrations, please get in touch at support@talis.com.
Askews & Holts supply shelf ready print, eBook and multimedia services to F.E & H.E Institutions. For more information about Askews & Holts, visit askewsandholts.com or email academic@askewsandholts.com
