This is the first in the series of short interviews compiled by Carl Grant, Associate Dean, Knowledge Services & Chief Technology Officer, University of Oklahoma Libraries, who is also the member of the Leganto Product Working Group.
Louise McGillis is the Associate University Librarian at Memorial University of Newfoundland and we talked to her to learn about their thoughts and plans concerning Leganto, the resource management module from Ex Libris.
Q: What is the status of your implementation?
A: Grenfell Campus, is a campus of Memorial University located in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, Canada. We are a smaller campus of a larger university 800km away in St. John’s, NL. We did a full implementation of Leganto in January 2017 and we are currently working with the libraries in St. John’s for a full roll out in May 2017.
Q: What is the major benefit you hope to see as a result of your institutions use of Leganto?
A: The major benefit of using Leganto is to simplify & streamline access to course material for students, so they can spend more time reading, and not searching for course material. We believe that using Leganto can embed the library in a more meaningful way into the teaching and research activities of the university.
Q: What do you see as the major challenge you’ll encounter in getting your community of users to utilize Leganto?
A: Faculty are very busy individuals, so the biggest challenge is to find the time to work with them about moving to Leganto. At Grenfell, we met with the faculties & schools and the Teaching & Learning Committee to provide information about Leganto and the advantages for faculty and their students.
Q: How will you measure success?
A: We are currently on our third pilot. We did exit interviews with faculty and students to obtain their impressions of the product. As well we have kept use statistics. Here are some of the numbers for the current semester: Grenfell campus offered 212 undergraduate and 7 graduate courses in Winter 2017. Of those, 54 courses have reading material in Leganto. As of Jan. 26, 2017 there are 743 items on reserve, compared with 271 items in Jan. 2016 and 303 in Jan. 2015. Of the 54 courses using Leganto, 23 are also using course shells in D2L. The remainder of the courses are accessing Leganto directly from a link on the library web page. Going forward we will be using analytics & product features to help faculty increase student interactions with course reading material.
Q: How can the user group best be of help to you?
A: I would be most interested in how other libraries are using Leganto Analytics, copyright checker and SIPX.
Q: How do you see Leganto contributing to the positioning of your library within your University?
A: I feel that Leganto positions us well because we are providing a good service to faculty and students. We obtain reading lists from faculty and make the Leganto lists for them. Library staff upload the PDF files of articles and book chapters to the lists for easy student access. We have received very positive feedback from both students and faculty around both Leganto and the library support of the product.
Carl Grant
Associate Dean, Knowledge Services & Chief Technology Officer
University of Oklahoma Libraries