As we rapidly approach the end of 2017, it’s appropriate to reflect on some of the Axiell Gang meetings that we have had over the last few months. For those not familiar with the Axiell Gangs, they are small regional strategy meetings that we have with our customers to share and discuss the latest updates to our products, services and initiatives for public libraries. In this blog you’ll find out what we learned, the key topics we covered and what our ongoing focus will be.
“Fantastic day with an opportunity to meet the staff that work at Axiell and the chance to network with other authorities.”
The Axiell Gangs and the User Conference form part of a programme of events aimed at ensuring our customers’ have a voice, and are kept informed. We use these events as a way to provide additional, more personal support to our customers, helping them to learn about our products and shape our future developments by feeding back into senior members of staff from the Axiell UK team. It’s also a valuable opportunity to meet other users from the Axiell community, to network and share ideas and best practices.
“I really like the mix of formal and informal communication and the fact that you are listening to customers.”
Over the course of the three events – held in London, Nottingham and Edinburgh – there were some key themes that emerged. Here are just some…
An integrated solution
Earlier in 2017 we announced that we were merging our business areas in the UK to offer a more integrated solution to the cultural sector, and so one important area of discussion was around integrated services, specifically, what we’ve done since we first announced this strategic change, and what we are continuing to do into the future.
Our vision is to create an Integrated Knowledge Platform; a holistic, connected framework for providing connected services. As our products evolve to enable the delivery of our vision for integrated cultural services, we discussed how integration through APIs will see the introduction of new features for products like Arena, which can incorporate search results from sources other than the library catalogue, turning it into a public-facing interface for all cultural content within an authority, whether a book, museum artefact, local history image or archive item.
Events management
It was clear from talking to our customers that events management is an important part of library life, from patrons being able to search for events, to staff being able to manage and promote these events. A key part of our vision for delivering the Integrated Knowledge Platform is to make events management simpler and more effective for our customers in 2018. Users of Arena as a discovery portal should be able to find events from across all libraries, archives and museums within an authority, and staff should be able to create these events, manage registrations and promote them quickly and easily.
“The single most important thing I took from the day was the feeling that Axiell are pro-active and developing for the future.”
Quria
2017 saw the very first library go-live with our new Library Services Platform, Quria, in Drammen, Norway. This marked a huge step forward for Axiell, and will deliver features and functionality that will transform the way Library Management Systems are perceived. In the UK, the first trial of Quria will take place with one of our customers in 2018, so watch this space for more information about that.
GDPR, online support and more…
Other popular topics of conversation with customers were on online support and video guides; GDPR and data protection (more info to follow shortly); online customer forums; and using data and analytics for marketing purposes. We discussed our vision for each of these topics, as we seek new ways to improve our support services in 2018, and follow our conviction that business intelligence and simple tools for data analytics are critical in underpinning successful, efficient library services.
So, to conclude, we learned a lot from, and shared a lot with, our customers that came to the Gangs. What we shared at these events is just a snapshot of the work that happens throughout the year, and we’ll continue to evolve our products and services and keep you up to date via the newsletter and at events. The list below highlights some of our latest offerings that were discussed at the events:
- Digital Asset Management for libraries – integrating local history images into Arena.
- Improving the discoverability of your catalogue by getting listed in Google Search Results.
- Understanding analytics and reporting with marketing guides aimed at introductory and advanced level.
- Integration and the benefits of partnerships with museums, special libraries and archives.
- LMS health-checks and consultancy to ensure your system is set up to align with your needs.
Whether you want an LMS health-check, would like to know how to make improvements to your Arena, or just want some more information about anything mentioned above, you can get in touch via the button below.