Talis: A Sage Publishing Company, a year on…

The following article was written by Talis Chief Operating Officer, Alison Spencer for the Talis Informer newsletter.

A little over a year since SAGE Publishing (SAGE) acquired Talis, it feels like an opportune point to reflect on what this has enabled. At the time of the acquisition, SAGE outlined that they wanted to invest in Talis to enable us to do more of what we were already doing, broadening reach into existing and new markets, as well as looking at developing further services. In a business like Talis, the way to do more is to increase the number of people, and in the last 12 months, Talis have increased resourcing by over 20%, which is giving us some great new opportunities to grow.

As Talis develops, our existing universities remain central to our thinking, to ensure that we deliver services that make a real difference to the current Talis community. Talis has invested in delivering an experience that builds confidence and trust, and these remain at the heart of Talis. I have taken on the role of Chief Operations Officer, joining the Talis board, to ensure a maintained focus on not only the coordination, delivery, and oversight of key business objectives, but ensuring that we maintain (and challenge ourselves to further improve) the Talis experience.

I write this mid-October, which for our UK universities is the start of their academic year. Such a busy time for your teams, but equally for Talis. We expect to see an increase in traffic to Talis Aspire of approximately 25% over the coming month, so as you would expect, the team have been planning to support this increase in demand. Over the last 30 days, Talis Aspire services have had 100% uptime. We continue to focus on building a robust, flexible, scalable and proven service that meets your students and academics expectations.

As part of the Talis Aspire service development, we have been working to create a more connected executive community, built of Library Directors and Deputy Directors. Talis Informer (the newsletter this post is part of), is about sharing strategic thinking around the provision of services that libraries care about. If you would like any of your colleagues to join the mailing list for this newsletter, please ask that they email info@talis.com. To support this newsletter, Talis have also brought representatives of university library senior management together to create a Talis Advisory Board (TAB), working to contribute to the strategic direction of Talis. If you would like to input into the discussion, or read topics that the group identified as being impactful, do sign up to the Talis Informer JISC mail list.

Talis Aspire has had a great year with a number of key product improvements that your team will be benefiting from, the key one being the rollout of new user experiences for List View and List Edit. We are now turning our attention to Data, working to deliver improved access to data feeds (which you can then build into university data warehousing programmes), as well as improving the use of data within Talis Aspire via more visual dashboards. It would be great to hear what challenges you are having around data, and what you care about on the JISC mail list, whilst TAB are meeting in November specifically to focus on the data issues so topics raised will be debated as part of that meeting.

In the last 12 months, 7 universities have trialled Talis Elevate with around 3000 students using the service. We are already receiving great feedback, and two of those universities have become Talis Elevate customers. We will give you a more detailed update in upcoming editions of this newsletter.

If you have any questions on anything I have outlined above, or would like to explore any of these in more detail, then please do let me know (as@talis.com).

This post was created exclusively for the Talis Informer, a quarterly newsletter from Talis aimed at those leading and influencing Higher Education libraries. If you’d like to receive the newsletter, please get in touch at info@talis.com. For even more content and discussion, join the Talis Informer mailing group here.