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A recap of Talis Insight APAC 2023 

Alison Rooney

Held over two days in February, Talis Insight APAC 2023 was a fully online event featuring presentations from a range of speakers on a variety of different Higher Education topics. 

If you were unable to attend Talis Insight APAC 2023, recordings of most of these sessions are now accessible via the event website.  

Day 1 

The event kicked off with a keynote presented by Nicola Langford, International Sales Director at Technology from SAGE. Nicola talked about the products that have come together to form Technology from SAGE – Talis Aspire, Talis Elevate, Lean Library, and Sciwheel – and shared some insights into the strategic direction and aspirations that we hope to see from this portfolio.  

Next, we took on the theme: The Future of Libraries. Led by Laura Unwin, Operations Director at Technology from SAGE, we broke into groups to discuss some all-important questions: 

  • How has your role in the library changed from when your career first began?  
  • What changes were you starting to see before COVID? 
  • What challenges both new and old do you face today? 
  • Where do you see the future of the role of the librarian and the library? 
  • What are the biggest challenges facing us and are we ready for them?  

We then had a presentation from Leticia Medwell, Library Manager at Australian Catholic University (ACU). ACU recently implemented Lean Library in their institution – a tool they saw as an opportunity to become part of the student workflow and guide students back to the library’s resources. Leticia talked to us about what Lean Library is, how the browser extension works, the implementation process, what they love about it, and how they hope to grow its usage with their patrons. 

We wrapped up Day 1 of the event with a user group session on Advanced MIS. Natalie Hull, Assistant Manager Learning Resources at The University of Queensland (UQ) talked us through their journey with Advanced MIS, including tenancy changes made to capture the best data and how they manage and store the data within UQ. Natalie also provided insight into their 2023 plans which include incorporating MIS data into a pre-existing analytics dashboard managed by the university’s learning analytics team. The library has also been using PowerBI to create internal dashboards to capture information such as: what lists were published and by who, data on importance’s, online versus print, academic and student engagement and more.  

Our final presentation of Day 1 was led by Bex Carruthers, Coordinator, Course Resources and Access at Deakin University. Bex’s presentation focused on Deakin’s use of Tableau to report on reading list statistics using Advanced MIS data. She shared information on the team and the resources they used, what Deakin set out to do during their trial of Advanced MIS. Plus, what they were doing before and after, what they had learnt, and what they plan to do next. Bex also shared some of the dashboards they’ve created including item clicks within lists which can be filtered by Faculty and item types and discussed how they plan to use these reports going forward.  

Day 2 

We kicked off Day 2 with a presentation by Scott Gibbens, Head of Product for Talis. Scott talked us through the development of products within the Technology for SAGE portfolio and then focused specifically on developments planned for Talis Aspire. He discussed what’s being worked on now within the product and provided an overview of the Talis Aspire roadmap for 2023. APAC customers can be involved in shaping those upcoming changes.  

Our second presentation of the day was led by Hugh Rundle, Manager Digital Discovery at La Trobe University, who discussed their ‘Digital and Free’ initiative which seeks to shift as many prescribed subject readings to digital formats that are accessible at no cost to students. Hugh discussed: why La Trobe is focusing their efforts on this, how this works and how they use Talis Aspire data to inform the project, the lessons they’ve learnt along the way and what’s next for this initiative.   

Our final session of Day 2 was an open discussion session hosted by your Talis Aspire User Group representatives, Elexia Rotundo and Jamie McDonald from La Trobe University. Elexia and Jamie shared a Padlet with users and hosted a discussion on a variety of different topics. These included quick wins and innovations, analytics, reviews and acquisitions, hierarchy, academic engagement and training and the use of Perlego.  

It was great to host another year of Talis Insight APAC and we look forward to an ongoing discussion with the user group community throughout the year. Remember, that you can catch-up on the session recordings here.  

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