The University of Liverpool‘s Elements implementation began in late 2015, and by the time their story was shared at our User Conference in June 2016, had already produced some impressive statistics.
The University, based in the north-west of England, is a research-intensive institution, with approximately 1200 core research staff. Their Elements system, known locally as Liverpool Elements, was introduced initially to help researchers capture and showcase their research activity, and deal with Open Access and Impact obligations. It was launched in April 2016.
Working with our implementation team, the Liverpool project team launched a phased module roll-out of Elements to all faculties, integrating it with existing institutional systems, putting the highest priority on user education and communicating the benefits of using it. This included close consultation with relevant stakeholder groups, drop-in user sessions, tailored support documents, targeted follow-ups and an integrated help-desk solution as part of an ongoing commitment to Liverpool Elements as the primary institutional research system.
The time between the first implementation meeting to the ‘go-live’ date was a mere 22 weeks, and some encouraging statistics have already arisen. Three and half months post-launch, Liverpool have seen:
- Over 1600 users logged in
- 75% of core research staff logged in
- Details of over 28,000 new publications found through data harvesting
- A further 2,200 new publications added manually
- Over 1600 full texts deposited
User feedback of Liverpool Elements illustrates the success of this process. Rachel Baird, Research Policy Analyst, based in the Research Policy Team, said:
“Feedback to date has been extremely positive from all levels across the University, with individual academics and colleagues actively promoting the ease of use of the system.”
We were delighted to see how users have praised the system:
“It works like a charm and makes me happy”
“A thousand times better than the old system”
“It works magically”
“It’s weirdly soothing”
We can only predict further success for Liverpool Elements, and look forward to seeing how adoption of the system grows as more modules are phased in.
Congratulations to the team at Liverpool for a highly successful roll-out!
