Libraries praise TLC’s new Academic Reserves

The Library Corporation’s new Academic Reserves functionality delivers a powerful new tool to college and university libraries. Charlotte Nutter of Denver Seminary in Colorado calls it “the Cadillac of Reserves modules.”

Available at no extra charge to users of TLC’s Library•Solution automation system, Academic Reserves enables staff members at academic libraries to easily add, edit, and remove titles set aside for students enrolled in a particular course or set of courses. Students then use the library’s online public catalog to find and check out the designated course-related titles.

“The integration of the Academic Reserves function with the PAC means your students and professors can see with a click of the button from a drop-down list every item on reserve for a department, course, or professor, or a combination of the three,” Ms. Nutter said. “Whether you have a few course reserves, or over 1,000 like we do, assigning, tracking, and un-assigning items could not be easier.”

The process begins in TLC’s LS2 Staff module, where a staffer enters titles in specialized Academic Reserves collections and specifies the length of time the collections will remain available. The titles are easily filterable and discoverable thanks to more than a dozen user-selected criteria including Instructor, Course, Department, Expiration Date, Title, Author, and more. “This makes the Academic Reserves window custom tailored to your needs,” Ms. Nutter said. “In addition, the lists can be sorted according to any of the 14 pieces of information.

“Individual items can be on reserve for multiple courses, sections, and professors, and they can have multiple release dates. Yeah!” Ms. Nutter said. “Un-assigning them at the end of the course is simple. There is a button and window that lets you select the expiration date and see only those items that expire on that date. You can select individual items or the entire list and remove them from reserve with one click.”

Also included in TLC’s Academic Reserves functionality are in-depth statistics that allow libraries to gather much more historical and statistical data than before. That’s one of the reasons Renna Tuten Reed of Anderson University said, “This is awesome. I love it.”

“TLC has designed the most comprehensive and user-friendly Academic Reserves function that I can imagine,” Ms. Nutter added. “I would put it up against any course reserve function in any integrated library system.”

To learn more about Academic Reserves for TLC’s Library•Solution ILS, call 1.800.325.7759 or e-mail info@TLCdelivers.com.