Talis Aspire in 2024: Connected Millions of Students to Content via Course Reading Lists
While Welcoming New Library Partners in the UK and US
Course resource lists are the starting point for many students in discovering content for their learning. Talis Aspire is a leading resource list management system that connects faculty and students to library holdings from directly within their course resource lists to boost student outcomes, increase usage of library content and help faculty do their best teaching.
As 2024 draws to a close, we’re reflecting on how institutions have put libraries at the heart of teaching and learning with Talis Aspire. Guided by invaluable customer feedback, we continued enhancing Talis Aspire’s features and functionality in 2024 to streamline librarian and faculty workflows – and secure better student outcomes.
Read on as we highlight the year’s key developments, new university partners, and share an exciting glimpse of what’s coming in 2025…
The Story of 2024 In Numbers
Talis Aspire remains a preferred resource list management system for institutions, facilitating the creation of over 1.65 million resource lists worldwide.
In 2024, institutions published nearly 340,000 resource lists, which were viewed by students nearly 40 million times, and generated over 50 million students clicks. This ultimately connected students to content from the library, Open Educational Repositories and online stores, saving students time and money to support their success.
Talis Aspire also supported the development of reading skills, with students setting over 1.2 million reading intentions against resources in 2024, to help differentiate between essential, extra and further reading.
Welcomed New University Partners
In 2024, we welcomed several new institutions to the Talis Aspire community; In North America, Rollins College implemented Talis Aspire to make more strategic and informed decisions about textbook purchases. We also welcomed new institutions from the UK, including Glasgow School of Art who selected Talis Aspire for its excellent customer support and commitment to actively develop the platform.
Success Stories from Universities
Saving students from class alone $125k at the University of North Texas Health Science Center
Amongst many customer success stories this year, University of North Texas Health Science Center (UNTHSC) stands out as a prime example of how Talis Aspire can inform acquisitions and make learning more affordable. UNTHSC used Talis Aspire to streamline workflows, provide better analytics and improve access to course materials. The library team can now estimate savings by calculating the cost of each item students used in course lists, for one class alone, the annual student savings exceeded $125,000. Read the full case study here.
Embedding Talis Aspire into library strategy at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam embedded Talis Aspire into its library strategy, using in conjunction with Lean Library, to increase the use of open educational resources, decrease possible copyright infringements of educational materials and reduce the library’s annual spending on academic content. Read the full case study here.
Gaining insight into student engagement with digital resources at La Trobe
La Trobe University leveraged Talis Aspire Advanced MIS to gain crucial insight into student engagement with digital resources, inform procurement decisions and streamline the library’s overall workflow. This effort resulted in 75% of courses now having a reading list. The library has also successfully tracked the percentage of lists containing ‘all-digital’ prescribed items, currently at 85%. Read the full case study.
Testimonials from libraries about Talis Aspire
Product Developments in 2024
We continuously developed Talis Aspire this year to better support the needs of librarians. Below, we highlight a few of the key enhancements made in 2024.
Optimized the bookmarking experience
We significantly enhanced the bookmarking process with a new release of the Talis Bookmarking extension and brought key improvements including improved metadata support.
Key improvements included:
- Enhanced website support: Improved compatibility with a wider range of websites to ensure more accurate metadata capture.
- New bookmarking page: Updates to reduce the need for metadata corrections during reviews.
- Bookmarking alerts: A new alert system now notifies academics without the extension, encouraging them to install it.
Streamlined librarian workflows
Several updates were made to Talis Aspire to simplify and enhance librarian workflows:
British Library EHESS orders: A new solution to streamline British Library EHESS orders directly within Talis Aspire.
New item alerts: Item-specific alerts that highlight changes requiring attention.
Update directly from Reviews: The ability to request resource digitization, update an item’s importance level, and assign outcomes to multiple items at once—all directly from the Reviews section, saving time and eliminating the need for multiple open screens.
Made configuration of settings self-serve
Librarians can now take control of platform configurations with new self-serve settings.
System administrators can independently edit account configurations, including language, branding, and item importance settings.
Enhanced list creation
This year, we’ve introduced several key improvements to make the list creation process as seamless as possible:
- Multiple list owners: Students can access lists even if the original creator is not the lecturer.
- List status labels: New labels Draft List, Published List, and Unpublished Changes provide editors with greater visibility into list status.
- Improved broken link reporting: Simplified troubleshooting with user-friendly tools to report and address broken links.
- Internal notes: New functionality allows faculty and librarians to add internal notes, improving collaboration.
Enhanced the user experience
You can read about even more improvements made to Talis Aspire this year in our blog below:
READ THE BLOG
2025 Roadmap & Beyond
Exciting new features are planned for Talis Aspire in 2025. Stay tuned as we’ll announce these developments next year. In the meantime, here’s a taste what’s in store:
- Enabling collaboration and social annotation with Talis Engage
Talis Engage is a new media player and social reader that enables students to socially annotate learning materials within their lists. - New resource tags to enable DEI projects and more
Users will be able to tag list items for admins to report on in Advanced MIS. Tags can be used to support DEI or other initiatives at institutions, for example reporting on the number of resources tagged as diverse voices in lists. - New resource types
Additional resource types such as newspaper, database or physical resource will be added to Talis Aspire to enable better reporting, collection management and referencing.
As always, we thank the institutions within the thriving Talis Aspire community for their continued loyalty and wish you all a happy New Year.
If your library does not yet use Talis Aspire and wants to know how it could benefit from a resource list management system or see how Talis Aspire compares to your current solution, request a demo today.
