This month, the Ex Libris Implementation Team welcomed back Megan Drake from Ex Libris for our follow up to the six-month health check. Following two days of meeting with representatives from various Ex Libris working groups, Megan provided some very actionable suggestions for improving our processes and making our workflow more efficient in Alma. The team is working hard to integrate her suggestions into our processes.
Leganto Implementation
This month also marked the kickoff of the Ex Libris Leganto project. Leganto is a course reserves platform that is integrated with both Alma and the course management systems we support at Rutgers, like Canvas, Sakai, Moodle, and Blackboard. This product will give instructors more control over developing their course reserves lists and put the power of the library directly in their course space to help them provide electronic resources and streaming video from our subscriptions, and realtime catalog information for physical reserves.
Because faculty members are able to create their own course reading lists, Leganto will enable us to increase our course reserves services without creating additional work for reserves management in access services. Students will be able to access course reserves directly from their course management system on any device and Leganto will help faculty select clean pdfs from our subscription databases rather than scans of readings. The system also provides robust analytics and encourages faculty to use materials from within our subscription databases for course reserves, providing us with a more accurate understanding of usage. Ex Libris provides a good overview of the product in this video demo.
Ex Libris expects that our implementation process will take 12 weeks and the team plans to conduct a pilot with several courses during the summer with an official launch in Fall 2019. Faculty engagement is important for the success of Leganto, so expect to hear soon from your campus Leganto Team representative about communication strategies and training.
