Lean Library in 2024: Simplified Access to Library Resources Nearly 50M Times

Libraries work tirelessly to curate exceptional collections, resources and services to support their users. However, often, these resources are under utilized due to many students and researchers remaining unaware of the full extent of the library offerings – and having to disrupt their usual research workflows to access these offerings.

Lean Library plays a pivotal role in bridging this gap for institutions by embedding library content and services directly into users’ online workflows via a browser extension, whether they were searching on Google, PubMed, ChatGPT or beyond.

2024 was a year of growth and innovation for Lean Library; we welcomed many new library partners (who you can read about in our community round-up post), incorporated librarian feedback into the product, and released brand new features that took users beyond discovery and access through to learning about AI and citation. While building Lean Library’s offering into a fuller, end-to-end research workflow tool, we recognized the need to balance new features with optimizing core functionality as an access broker, so also dedicated significant resource to enhancing performance this year.

As the year draws to a close, it’s the perfect time to reflect on the product’s developments and what our library partners achieved with Lean Library in 2024.

The Story of 2024 In Numbers

As a division of Sage, Technology from Sage supports Sage’s mission to build bridges to knowledge. This year, libraries around the world used Lean Library build bridges to knowledge by putting their library content, services and resources in front of more students and researchers, while making their lives easier with a tool that boosts productivity, saves time and money, and supports development of information literacy and academic skills.

In 2024, together with our library partners, Lean Library:

• Simplified access to library subscribed resources over 49.5 million times, saving users an estimated 1.65 million hours*.
• Connected users to over 1.1 million full-text articles and eBooks through alternative legal routes when users hit paywalls.
• Unlocked access to nearly 350,000 Open Access resources, resulting in estimated savings of $14 million*.
• Displayed customized messages from the library to users on any domain via the Assist Message functionality over 3.2 million times, averaging more than 22,000 views per institution.
• Boosted academic success with over 5.7 million searches enhanced via the browser extension on Google Scholar and PubMed.
• Built users’ information literacy skills with 80,000 interactions with Lean Library’s scite.ai integration that helps users assess the integrity of resources they are reading.
• Pioneered AI literacy by surfacing best-in-class AI literacy training directly on AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and others.

Product Developments in 2024 

Recommitted to Enhancing Performance and Core Functionality 

Having dramatically increased Lean Library functionality in the last few years, we took the opportunity in 2024 to double down on our commitment to Lean Library’s core functionality and enhancing performance based on feedback from customer librarians. Significant developments and continuous improvements were made “under the hood” to Lean Library in 2024 to improve the user experience and meet the needs of customer librarians.

As a result, the Access and Alternatives functionality now delivers improved performance, providing a more efficient and seamless experience for all users. Examples of these improvements made include: 

• Improvements and optimizations made around memory management increased extension performance by over 110%, and resolved issues with API endpoints and SPA websites that use large media.
• Lean Library now supports HAN Proxy system for authentication, as well as EZProxy and RemoteXs, offering greater choice for libraries and making Lean Library a more compatible offering for institutions using the HAN Proxy authentication system. 
• Administrators can now add wildcard characters when configuring e-resource domains for more streamlined and efficient domain management – supporting customers who use platforms like EBSCOhost where URLs include dynamic subdomains. 

To learn more about other releases, read the support article here. 

Similarly, Lean Library launched a new, refreshed support site to make it easier for customer librarians to search and explore all available support articles, raise tickets directly from the support page, and track progress of the tickets – all to provide an unmatched customer experience and the highest standard of support.  

Innovated with New Features, Taking Libraries Further into Research Workflows 

The recommitment to core functionality did not hinder the innovation that Lean Library is known for, since being the first library solution to bring library guidance and other services into online workflows back in 2021.  

In 2024, Lean Library added brand new features to address the ever-evolving needs of libraries, students and researchers. Here are some of the major product releases this year.  

Lean Library now further supports information literacy with article retraction data  

Lean Library deepened its integration with scite.ai to incorporate article retraction data into the browser extension. This new functionality flags retracted articles as users access them, helping users assess reliability of resources they use in their research to support their research integrity.

Lean Library now instantly generates citations to use with any reference manager 

At the start of this year, Lean Library launched Cite; a quick and easy tool that generates and copies references resources users are on to use with any reference manager – whether Zotero, EndNote, Mendeley, Sciwheel, or others. Cite supports both articles and eBooks and librarians, provides alerts when there is incomplete citation metadata, and librarians can select citation styles for their institution. Learn more about Cite here. 

Lean Library now provides targeted guidance on ChatGPT

With the explosion of AI, students and researchers are increasingly using tools like ChatGPT in their research. To support libraries in navigating this, Lean Library integrated with Sage Campus to surface a free online course, The Art of ChatGPT Interactions, directly through the Lean Library extension when users are on the OpenAI.com domain. Users can complete the course within the extension or in a new tab and earn a certificate upon completion. The integration provides users with academically and pedagogically rigorous guidance right at the point of need as they use ChatGPT, without interrupting their workflow. It demonstrates the value of the library and promotes the academic library as a source of guidance on AI to patrons. Learn more about the integration here.  

Libraries can now toggle-on the most popular targeted messages on any domain

Lean Library’s Assist Messages feature surfaces customizable messages from the library on any website. To further streamline the process for time-strapped librarians, Lean Library launched ready-to-use templates of popular and effective Assist Messages that can be toggled on instantly, while still being fully customizable for personalization.  

Looking Ahead: 2025 Roadmap & Beyond 

There are some exciting announcements and bold innovations in 2025 for Lean Library, expanding capabilities to take the library deeper into research workflows, boost researcher productivity and support student success. We cannot share the announcements just yet, but in the meantime, here is a taste of what’s in store for next year and beyond:

Deeper insights into research workflows for libraries
Lean Library is further developing the usage stats and insights provided to librarians, with easy export for sharing. 

Improvements to Additional Library Search
As requested by our librarian partners, Lean Library plans to integrate with ExLibris Summon for our Additional Library Search feature that will enable more institutions to bring their library discovery layer deeper into their patrons’ workflows. In addition, there will be other targeted improvements made to Additional Library Search to drive more usage of library-licensed content.  

Faster, more intuitive set-up in the Librarian Dashboard
As librarians are increasingly strapped for time, Lean Library is investigating ways to provide faster, more intuitive set-up and configuration via our Librarian Dashboard.  

Continued commitment to streamlining access to content
Early next year, Lean Library is launching Print Alternatives that will transform how patrons discover print materials by directly integrating into the library’s discovery system, helping bridge the entirety of library resources into patron workflows with Lean Library. And, as always, we will look to continuously improve our access features, focusing on more sophisticated control of Open Athens authentication and new discovery service connections for Alternatives. 

Taking the library into the authoring stages of research workflows
Early next year, we will announce new developments to Lean Library that offers users support right through to the authoring stages of their workflows. While we can’t say more just yet, this will be a one-of-a-kind offering for libraries and a game-changer for researchers. Stay tuned!

If you are interested in Lean Library for your institution, request a demo today.