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Identifying print books in Talis Aspire

Tim Hodson
  • Updated

Introduction

With the increased preference for electronic resources over print / physical resources, it's useful to know where items are being recommended to students, but are not being linked to electronic resources. 

When an item is created it can contain useful web addresses (links to the full-text resource), but they can also contain other links. To completely review your reading list content for print books, you'll need to look for:

  • Items without a web address
  • Items with a web address that does not take you to the full text, eg.
    • a bookstore or publisher's online catalogue (eg. amazon.com)
    • the table of contents from your catalogue record (eg. loc.gov/catdir/toc...)
    • if the bookmark contains a DOI, it has pulled a web address from CrossRef to a site that is not available via the library

There are two methods you could use to retrieve this information from Talis Aspire: Talis Aspire Reports and Advanced MIS. This article will guide you through the process for each method.

Talis Aspire Reports method

Using the All List Items report, you'll first need to apply filters to identify only the items of interest. For example:

  • Use the Resource Type filter to display only those types you are interested in (eg. books and chapters).
  • Use the time period filter to focus just on the current or upcoming time period(s) and not worry about correcting links from those that have already ended.

Once you've applied the filters and previewed the results to ensure you're capturing the items you're intending to, you can export the report to a CSV file and open it in a spreadsheet management tool such as MS Excel.

With your exported report open in MS Excel (or similar), you can now start to sort and filter the results to identify items that are not available electronically from your reading list. There are several checks to perform in order to get a complete picture and these include:

Books without web addresses

Step 1: Apply filters to your columns and then navigate to the Web Address column.

Step 2: Open the filter and deselect the 'Select All' option, then scroll to the bottom and select the '(Blanks)' option.

Web_Address_and_all_list_items_2020_07_15__1_.png

Step 3: Sort the spreadsheet to group together the same works and identify where different editions of the same work are in use.  We would recommend filtering in the following order:

  1. Title
  2. Date of publication
  3. ISBN13
  4. ISBN10

You can now work through these resources.

Books with web addresses

Step 1: Apply filters to your columns and then navigate to the Web Address column.

Step 2: Open the filter option and under the Filter menu, open the first drop-down menu and select "contains". You can now enter the address you're wanting to view/consider as being held in print (eg. Amazon, loc.gov... etc).

Web_Address_and_all_list_items_2020_07_15__1___2_.png

Step 3: Sort the spreadsheet to group together the same works and identify where different editions of the same work are in use.  We would recommend filtering in the following order:

  1. Title
  2. Date of publication
  3. ISBN13
  4. ISBN10
  5. Online Resource Link (important to ID where the link resolver is being used as this may or may not be leading to electronic holdings). - NEW July 2020

You can now work through these resources.

Advanced MIS method

If you have access to the Advanced MIS service, you can streamline this investigation by querying the data warehouse directly - removing the need to do so much filtering in MS Excel.  For example, you can use SQL queries to identify:

  • items that contain known URLs in the web_address column of the public.f_rl_items table (eg. amazon.com, loc.gov/catdir/toc, etc.)
  • items that don't contain a web address

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