Tapping into the rich source of metrics in Leganto, libraries at major research universities are delivering evidence of student savings, improving collection decisions, and actively looking for new ways to drive the library and the university forward.
The State’s Largest Research University
The university’s library serves patrons at the academic institution and among the general public, with the largest collection and scope of services in the state. It is relied upon by other libraries statewide. The library employs over 300 people across several colleges and campuses.
Searching for an enterprise-level system
The Leganto course materials solution has been adopted by research university libraries across North America. Many of them are regularly called upon to play a strategic role in supporting courses across the institution.
Like many educational institutions of its size, one such Leganto customer has multiple campuses. Faculty may teach and students may take courses across the institution. This posed a challenge for the library in ensuring a consistent service across campuses.
After looking at various systems, the library decided that Leganto’s enterprise-level capabilities best met their needs.
Of particular importance was Leganto’s tight integration with other campus and university-level systems, including the learning management system, as well as its interoperability with Alma. The integrations enable automatic processes, saving library staff time and ensuring an excellent end-user experience. For example, if a link to a library resource is updated in Alma it is also instantly changed across all connected solutions, including Leganto, eliminating the need to manually update links to course materials within the learning management system.
A dynamic list for every course
With Leganto fully implemented across the institution, the library is now positioned to create reading lists for every single course offered, every semester, ensuring a library presence in every course. Leganto allows the library to automate the building of these reading lists using the Leganto APIs.
Additionally, faculty may customize the content of the lists as needed. Thousands of lists, among the tens of thousands created each year, include additional resources selected by faculty. Both teaching faculty and library staff have noted how much easier and faster it is to build robust course lists with Leganto.
Partnering with faculty to drive collection decisions
Leganto empowers the library to go the extra mile in helping instructors put together affordable course lists.
Rather than including high-cost textbooks, faculty are turning to the library to find resources already held in the library’s collection that map to course objectives. The faculty and subject librarians are collaborating through Leganto to facilitate improved rates of student access and student success.
In addition, the data captured by Leganto is key to informed collection development decisions. The library uses Leganto data to get a clear picture of which resources in each course list are covered by the existing collection, which are actually being used by students, and which additional materials students need for their courses. The library reports that Leganto data has a direct impact on the library’s collection, budget considerations and future planning.
Millions in student savings – and data to prove it
The rich data that Leganto delivers also serves to demonstrate library value to the rest of the campus. Leganto ensures that students can get their course materials via the library and therefore do not have to buy them. The library calculated that furnishing course lists that draw from the university’s collection potentially saved students about $6.1 million per year.
According to figures collected in Leganto, there were over 53,000 library-provided materials used during the academic year, serving over 73,000 students enrolled in the courses. The library computed the average value of each Leganto course list as $90, aligning with average textbook costs. From there, the library multiplied the average value of each list by the number of students enrolled.
The impact of those savings on students is significant and the data resonates with other stakeholders at the university. Leganto makes it easy to calculate such information and this research university library is enthusiastically sharing it with the university administration and the board of regents, highlighting the library’s role in supporting students.
