University of Liverpool builds new Digitisation Service with Talis Aspire Digitised Content to improve Student Experience

University of Liverpool is rolling out its brand new Digitisation Service this academic year. I had a chance to catch up briefly with Andrew Barker, Head of Academic Liaison, Special Collections & Archives at the University. I have met Andrew only twice before. His enthusiasm for academic and student experience, and his pride in the team that handles Reading Lists and Digitised Content is hard to miss.

“University of Liverpool never really had a proper digitisation service until now.”, explained Andrew, “Our new Digitisation Service using Talis Aspire Digitised Content, is really at the heart of our ‘Resources for Courses’ initiatives.”

The University website describes ‘Resources for courses’ as:

The ‘Resources for Courses’ initiatives aim to find new ways of ensuring that you can find the books and resources you need when you need them.

Andrew told me that they have a “partnership approach” at the University of Liverpool. They try to work closely with the Guild of Students to shape these initiatives to ensure they meet student needs.

Liverpool have achieved fantastic results with Reading Lists already. Carole Rhodes and Claire Sharpe have teamed up to really drive adoption. Within 12 months of rollout they have a staggering 1800+ active reading lists across the University.

“We already have over 1800 active reading lists in Talis Aspire Reading Lists. We identified delivering a scalable digitisation service as a key area of improvement. Selecting Talis Aspire Digitised Content was a no-brainer and a key component in our ability to deliver resources to students at the point of need.” said Andrew.

The Library has renewed its focus on the Digitisation Service team, which is equipped to create all digitisations fully in-house. Before the Talis Aspire Digitised Content module, this team had to also take on the process of completing all the CLA checks for each request. Once the checks are done and the digitisation is available, it required manual steps to make it available for students to access. Talis Aspire Digitised Content automates much of the checking process ensuring compliance. It also ensures students can access the materials securely and seamlessly via the flexible content player.

The new Digitisation service has been rolled out to a small group of academics to start with.

“We want to ensure our processes are robust, before we scale and the service is made available more widely. Following that, I hope we can emulate the same success we demonstrated with the reading lists adoption. I don’t see why not, we have a great team behind it!”, Andrew explained.

We look forward to seeing the Digitisation Service at University of Liverpool rolled out in full, soon!

What are your experiences of rolling out a Digitisation Service at your institution? Please share your thoughts or questions in the comments below.