Case Study – Exeter College

“I have responsibility across the college for buying resources and ensuring that our systems function and work as they should. I review, replace, update our resources as required.”

Jennifer has been at the college for four and a half years and had previously worked in libraries for around 20 years. When she arrived at Exeter College, she quickly saw that the existing system was no longer meeting their needs. While Jennifer herself is a trained librarian, many of the wider team were not, and the old platform felt far more complex than it needed to be. Beyond the technical barriers, it also felt visually dated.

“It didn’t meet staff needs anymore because half of them didn’t understand it, didn’t know how it worked, and I didn’t feel it also met our learners’ needs for similar reasons”

That feeling was reinforced by student feedback. As Jennifer put it, “One of my favourite comments from a student was, ‘Oh, it looks like a 1990s government website.’”

When it came time to choose a new system, what made Accessit stand out most was how simple it was to use on both the back and front end, with real language and intuitive workflows. The biggest turning point came when Jennifer saw what Accessit Search could do. Not only could learners search for physical resources, but through One Search they could also search across the college’s online subscriptions from one place.

“Rather than going into each individual subscription and doing an individual search, just go to One Search, make sure you’re signed in and it will search everything we’ve got, literally everything. We’re working with a generation of Google searches and ChatGPT searches, this is what they want, and I think it gives it to them.”

In practice, the system has delivered exactly what Jennifer had hoped for. Accessit’s Single sign-on reduces friction for learners accessing resources, while the simpler interface has led to less confusion from both staff and students. Jennifer says it has meant fewer “how do I do this?” questions and less hesitation around using the system in the first place.

Accessit has also had a significant impact on how Jennifer and the team present resources. Built-in features such as dashboards are being used to highlight collections that may otherwise stay hidden, while visual search has been adapted into subject-based browsing to better suit the further education environment and help learners find course resources more easily.

“We set up our visual search, so it’s actually subject-based. So if you’re doing maths, you just click on maths. The feedback from that’s been really positive because we’ve been able to link resources that way I think everybody just feels more comfortable.”

It is still early days, so Jennifer has not yet been able to run a full comparative report against the old system, but she says she can already see the difference in how learners and staff are engaging with the library and its resources.

Exeter College is a strong example of how further education libraries need something specific. Accessit fills that role by offering a system that is flexible enough to adapt to the environment, simple enough to feel approachable, and powerful enough to support the broad collection needs of a multi-campus college.

Jennifer is confident in Accessit’s ability to help learners reach and engage with the college’s resources more easily, and she has already been recommending it to other colleges across the country.

“I have spoken to many other colleges across the UK about our migration and about the system. I think libraries and library provision in education have changed so much post covid and this system reflects the changes that we need to make. You won’t regret moving to Accessit.”

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