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E-platforms opening access during COVID-19

Rebecca Carruthers
Shift to Online

COVID-19 has already had a big impact on life as a whole, and this will continue for some time to come. As university staff and students grapple with 100% online teaching and study, publishers and e-resource providers are helping to support their consumers.

What does this mean for you:

Many Publishers and Platforms are working together to grant limited-time access to titles and collections – this could be extending your current subscription from limited to unlimited concurrent users, reduced prices for single concurrent user titles, or opening access to resources you previously did not have access to. This means more resources available online at a time when this is critical. 

 

Information on what’s available:

There are a lot of places to find information on who is providing access to what and for how long, but here are a few to get you started:

Using Talis Aspire we have undertaken some spot-checking to ensure these resources are bookmarking as expected, however, if you find a resource that is not bookmarking well, please follow the usual process and raise a support ticket.

 

Tips for removing links after access has been revoked:

As said above, these amazing access permissions have been granted for a limited time, so you do need to have a plan for removing links to unowned resources when they are no longer available to you. Here are some tips for making your future a little easier:

  • Make the resources easily identifiable 
    • Add a section to your list to include these short term accessible resources. It can then be removed or updated once the access has been revoked.
    • Add a student note stating access will be temporary – this is good practice as it will help students prioritise reading resources before the cutoff date.
    • Create a separate reading list for resources that are available for the short term – you may already have a libguide or blog where you share trials etc. This may be a good location for this information.
  • Check out what is being added to your reading lists by running an All Lists Items report, filtered to a recent date range (eg. 1/03/20 to 31/03/20).  Ensure a student note is added detailing when the access will be removed – this can then be your trigger for removing the URL once access is removed.
  • You may wish to make use of the Talis Aspire Developer APIs (specifically the V3 APIs). These APIs are available for all universities to read data from your Reading Lists Tenancy, and also write data to lists and items – there would need to be some technical knowledge at your university in order to use these. More information on these APIs is available at https://support.talis.com/hc/en-us/articles/205862321-Developer-APIs, do raise a support ticket for further information.

Talis wish to take the opportunity to reassure you that we are still open and here to support you and your students. We are fortunate to have well established remote working capabilities and will continue to provide a full 24/7 monitoring and support service across the global community of universities who use Talis.

 

As ever if you have any issues, tasks, or questions, please raise a support ticket by emailing support@talis.com or visiting https://support.talis.com/.  For any urgent or time-bound issues, please raise a support ticket and escalate the ticket by emailing Laura Unwin (lu@talis.com).  

 

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