My colleague Jeffrey Delgado and I have been setting up Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) to integrate our library’s LibGuides with the broader campus BlackBoard ecosystem. The advantage of this is that it will put library content in more course shells, and hopefully extend the reach of our guides and our other web content.

The downside, to me, is that this is a lot of technical overhead for what is, when it comes down to it, a hyperlink. The technical setup for LTI wasn’t too onerous (it took a couple of days), but it’s pretty much equivalent to putting a hyperlink to the library (or a library guide) in BlackBoard.

I guess we’re hoping to solve by technical means what we have not been able to achieve through organizational means. To me, this seems… optimistic? There was nothing stopping faculty from linking to the library from their BB shells previously, but they often didn’t. Hopefully the LTI integration can prompt faculty to include the library where they otherwise might not have. While I have doubts about this strategy, it’s worth a try.

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