This session is about a ’21st Century’ approach to academic resource lists (a.k.a. Reading lists). Talis have had a product ‘Talis List’ for several years, but they are now working on ‘Project Zephyr’ for a Next Generation approach to this – I’m hoping that this session is going to cover what they are doing in this area.
It looks like this is another case study with Fiona Greig from the University of Plymouth – who I just talked to over lunch.
Starting with Chris Clarke from Talis – outlining the problems of reading/resource list management – Students who want resources, Academics who are short on time, and librarians who need to get lists, order resources, setup loan statuses, etc.
Talis list has been around for several years – can be used with any LMS, and integrates with ‘the VLE’ (that latter statement isn’t very specific). But – could be improved – better integration with LMS, ability to suggest loan strategies for items on resource lists based on usage, better workflows.
Now the case study – they have the current Talis List product. University of Plymouth have traditionally had problems getting the lists from academics. So, focussed on carefully selected academics, and got 135 active modules with 504 active lists – went live in Septemer 2007. Already hearing that students are now demanding the service from their academics.
Student expectations:
- Full-text available straightaway
- They want control – how they use resources
- They want them remotely and on the move
- They share resources
- They use Multimedia – academics creating multimedia objects – move away from ‘essential reading’ to ‘essential resources’
- They want to know when they should read something (e.g. which week of the course) – alerts to tell them
Emphasis from Fiona that it has to be driven by the students – they are the main users. She suggests that you have to bring the academics along with you, but you can’t simply listen to what the academics want, as you will alienate the students.
Main feedback from Academics – the system isn’t easy enough, and isn’t flexible enough. They want it to be even easier to build their list, and they find that it doesn’t always support the way they want to enter the citation.
Interestingly when Fiona suggested not calling this a ‘reading list’ system, but rather a ‘resource list’ system, she wasn’t able to get this through. I guess that this could be a pragmatic decision – I agree with Fiona, that we have moved from ‘reading lists’ to ‘resource lists’, but generally I think the former term would be better understood.
Now a recorded video interview with an academic in Human/Computer interaction (Alan from University of Lancaster – didn’t get his surname). He is relating how academics are often asked several times for lists by different resources (e.g. book shop, library), which is annoying, but the main reason seems to be that he doesn’t get time. Interestingly he relates how he puts the list on his own webpage, rather than using the formal systems (VLE etc.), which he says isn’t him being peverse, but that he simply doesn’t have time – essentially it seems that he finds the route of least resistance is to use his own website.
He seems pretty typical in accepting that he might be part of the problem, but he isn’t motivated enought to be part of the solution. He tells a story about how the bookshop didn’t stock his own textbook, that was a key text for the course – but then sheepishly admits that there could have been a request come round in the summer for him to say what reading he was recommending.
However, he suggests that he would be reluctant to do something different to having it on his webpage, but he would be willing to have it harvested from his webpage. I think this quote says it all, when he says he would be really reluctant to enter the list somewhere else "to me the control thing is quite important, I think a lot of academics are control freaks"
He claims that if he could see the benefits then he would do it – which is fair enough – but what he doesn’t seem to realise is that the benefit would be that the students could actually get hold of the texts he is recommending – so hopefully better pass rates, and certainly less students bothering him about how he could hold of his recommended reading.
Chris is now saying that the next generation of Talis List is going to be available well before Sept 2008 so can be used for Academic year 08/09 – sounds interesting. Now getting a (canned) demo of the system as it is at the moment:
- Quite a cool visual browse interface (slightly worried that this looks a bit gimmicky)
- Ability to divide a list into ‘sections’
- Adding items to the list using a ‘bookmarklet‘ – for example, browse Amazon, find book, click bookmarklet, it imports the reference into the list, and enhances with information from the library catalogue
- If you are on a website without any bibliographic details on it, the bookmarklet assumes you want to add that page to the reading list instead
- You can also search the library catalogue from within zephyr itself
- Can reorder list by dragging and dropping individual items, or sections
- Can expose list in multiple interfaces – the example used here is Facebook – cool
Overall, this looks very interesting – I’m due to have a chat with one of the Talis staff about this at somepoint (might try to find them before the last session).
There is a blog for Talis list at http://blogs.talis.com/list