Hi Michael

 

Yes, we have had quite a few cases of academics refusing to use the system because they wish to protect their intellectual property – they argued, quite plausibly, that another institution could “steal their course” by looking at a detailed reading list they had produced. Business School were the main ones with concerns but I had a couple in the Art & Design School I look after, too. One lecturer was very excited to have discovered some new Product Design books that no one else had ever heard of, and he didn’t want our competitors to find out about them through his reading lists!

 

The saving grace at NTU is that the system is very strongly supported by the senior management of the University.  They decided that the objections of these lecturers were less important than the convenience of having a populated Aspire list in every single module for the students. In short, the academics were directed from above to get on with publishing their lists on Aspire, whether they liked it or not. You might not have the luxury of that sort of support!

 

According to Google Analytics, in April 13.7% of all the hits on our Aspire lists came through Google or other search engines rather than directly through our VLE, which is an incredibly high figure when you consider that most of our Aspire lists have obscure names like “ELTC005: MA English Lang Teach FT Full Year (201112)” so I don’t think that you can just hope for the best – the lecturers will eventually realise that their lists can be easily found and examined by the outside world.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Best wishes

                                   Ian

 

 

 

 

Hi all

 

I’ve been doing a bit of advocacy on Aspire recently, and these sessions usually go swimmingly until the point where I mention that “anyone, anywhere can see your reading lists” and go on to say a bit about the benefits of students finding other lists from other institutions and vice versa.

 

Maybe it’s just Lancaster, or maybe it’s just the way I explain it, but the open nature of the reading lists is a major turn-off for many of our academics. So I just wanted to get clear in my head how non-lancaster people are likely to find our lists – I wasn’t sure for instance if Google crawls our tenancy – and how we persuade academics who say that my list is my intellectual property and I only want my students to see it.

 

Unless we tell everyone that their lists are being made public they don’t necessarily know this is the case, and we are being accused by some academics of rolling out this feature of the service ‘under the radar’. I know the list can be made private, but only the tenancy admin role can do that and there is nothing in the staff view to enable that to happen.

 

Sorry for sounding off, but if anyone has experienced this kind of push-back I’d be glad to know how you deal with it. In a demo session these arguments can derail the whole thing.

 

Thanks in advance,

Michael.

 

Michael Dunne | Assistant Librarian | The Library | Lancaster University

Lancaster | LA1 4YH | UK | +44(0)1524 592 701

 

 

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