This year, I attended the Charleston Conference on serials and acquisitions, presenting an introduction to Zephyr. I looked at how lists had moved into the library domain, the problems they solved and opportunities they could now present. This included a demo of the pilot at University of Plymouth, and some early insight into the impact on libraries.

I’ve recorded a post-conference video which is available in three parts. These should all play directly in your browser – just click the play icon when it displays. Hope you enjoy them!

Part 1: Introduction, understanding the problem domain, introducing the pilot.
Part 2: Demonstration of the pilot at University of Plymouth
Part 3: Understanding the lecturer and library viewpoint, conclusions & contact information

Ian

As discussed in Sprint 7, we are planning to run several student focus groups to to explore some of our ideas around student discovery. Plymouth have already signed up – are you interested in hosting a similar event?

Although we’re still in the planning stages of how to organise an event, we would be looking at up to a dozen students (who we will pay!). Depending on the stage in development, the make-up of the students and what we would be doing, is liable to change.

If you feel this is something you could put together, drop me an email.

One of the stories this sprint relates to viewing “My Resources” (http://jira.talis.com/browse/XIP-485) where a student can see lists they have subscribed to (in future, this list will likely be auto-populated to some degree based on their profile and module/course code data). My question is:

Scenario: A published list a student has “subscribed” to on their “My Resources” tab changes status from “published” to “draft”. What should the student see?

Should the list disappear? Should we leave the list name, but state “This list is no longer published and is in “draft” (or other?) state”? Something else?

My gut tells me putting a statement in should do the trick, as this will also indicate when a new list for a course is being worked upon, allowing the student to see the list exists, include it in their resources, but not yet see items it contains. It would also allow us to build business logic around things like archived lists “This list is archived” – in this scenario, rather than hiding items it contains, student could choose to view it or unsubscribe.

So, thoughts welcome…

In the early new year, we would like to get some students using the discovery part of the interface – to better understand what they like, what they don’t and probably most importantly, what’s missing that they’d really value. Both Plymouth and DeMontfort have indicated they have some interest in this – Plymouth having a library focus group in place, and DeMontfort operating a course which sets the students a task of evaluating a piece of library software (I’ll be contacting both of you shortly).

Are there any other institutions in similar positions? We are willing to make a nominal payment for the students time, if appropriate.

Cheers, Ian