As we wrap up 2022, we at BibliU are taking the opportunity to celebrate the many accomplishments and achievements of the year. Take a scroll down memory lane with us as we highlight some of the notable happenings at BibliU since January!
Over the past year, we’ve welcomed amazing new talent to BibliU. Our team has grown by around 13% since this time in 2021. We hope to welcome even more passionate members as we continue to scale and expand. You can find our open roles here!
BibliU reached an exciting milestone in 2022—we raised $15 million in Series B funding! We are honoured to have received support from all of our Series A investors: Stonehage Fleming, Oxford Science Enterprises, Guinness Ventures, and Nesta Impact Investments. Dave Sherwood, our CEO, said, “This funding will enable BibliU to develop additional technology that further automates content management for publishers, streamline the complexities for institutions associated with managing learning content, and – most of all – support our clients’ goals to advance student success in an equitable manner.”
Subsequently, BibliU has raised an additional $5.5 million investment, delivered by both current and new private investors including Sparkmind, Stonehage Fleming, Crowdcube Private Angels, Wealth Club, OIC and Oxin.
As we continue to expand, we are thrilled to welcome new clients to BibliU. This year, we have added South Piedmont Community College (Monroe, NC) to our customer list. BibliU has implemented our Universal Learning solution at SPCC to provide affordable e-textbooks, while boosting student engagement and improving resource usage. Dr. Maria Pharr, SPCC president, commented, “BibliU has been an integral part of the success of Learning Reimagined. Their platform is essential to our commitment to ensure student access to course material is more affordable, effective and streamlined.”
BibliU also established a partnership with Arden University (Coventry, UK) in 2022. Through our services, Arden academics were able to handpick 7,000 books directly relevant to its students course needs. Director of Library Services at Arden University, Jude Wilson, said: “We were impressed with the accessibility and interactive features of the BibliU platform and think that it will be very beneficial for many of our students, helping them to thrive throughout their time studying with us.”
Additionally, we are enthusiastic about our recent partnership with Victor Valley College (Victorville, CA). Dr. Daniel Walden, president of Victor Valley College, says, “Victor Valley College is the first school in California to implement BibliU’s Universal Learning model to reduce the cost of course materials for students.” We work closely with them to ensure students have access to course content on day one of class.
In 2022, BibliU worked with Coventry University and Green Shoots research agency to quantify the outcome of digital, interactive content on engagement and academic performance. Through this case study, we indeed discovered a correlation between the frequency of which students used BibliU and their mean module marks: BibliU users improved their mean module marks by 2.4%. To read more about the data collected through these efforts, download the case study here.
We’ve been hard at work to make a difference in the lives of students. Seeing just how effective our model can be through the aforementioned Coventry University case study, we are excited about the positive impact our platform will have on those who use BibliU. During this past year, BibliU users read over 9.3 million minutes worth of content. 587,069 unique readers from 164 BibliU-supported institutions have read 20,975 different titles.
We are looking forward to providing even more content for our partners in 2023!
This year, we have significantly improved student billing processes for our Universal Learning institutions. We provide our partners more flexibility in the opt out process by supporting rolling start dates. Billing has never been easier than with our enrolment management solution that integrates into SIS/LMS systems.
Students can find everything they need in one place. In the past, students have had to find access codes to courseware themselves. With BibliU, they can now access their unique codes in the BibliU student reader library. They can now also opt out directly through the app rather than having to go to an external site.
BibliU provides increased flexibility for librarians. We now support monographs through both multi-publisher evidence-based acquisition (EBA) and automated reading list availability purchasing processes. We have invested significant resources in improving our content coverage and offering more affordable licences to our customers. Librarians can now automate their Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) record deployment to File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or Order History on the app.
Additionally, security has been at the core of our Integration and Data Transfer solutions in 2022. Our FTP Transfer processes have now been upgraded to Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). We currently run LTI 1.3, which means that our integrations offer more secure data transfer/onboarding.
One BibliU goal for the year 2022 was to increase our efforts towards sustainability. We are thrilled to share that we achieved a Bronze Badge from EcoVadis. This recognition means that BibliU is in the top 50% of suppliers when it comes to sustainability. However, this work is never finished, and in the coming year we will continue on our journey towards sustainable business practices.
A 2022 highlight for many of us at BibliU was our company retreat in November. Gathering in Windsor, we had the pleasure of bringing together our global company into one room. Through team building exercises and socialising, we formed connections and memories across departments. We even got to hear from our Board chair, Mark Whitby. This retreat has energised us for another great year of continuing to expand BibliU’s reach. Check out some photos of our fantastic team!
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