One of the outcomes of the Student Feedback Project was the creation of a Student Feedback Data Dashboard.

We are expanding the collections on Libby to include Audiobooks

We created a new free Community Membership for external users of the Library 

The Library is the leader on support for student digital skills, including use of GenAI for learning. This pilot will be evaluated by Jan 2026 and has a three-pronged approach looking at ensuring student awareness, exploration and embedding of these key skills. 

Through Our Students Steering Group members we are actively encouraging all Library staff connected to designing or delivering student facing services, in any way, to broaden their usual scope of reference when considering conferences events and the exploration of good practice; especially those that encourage us to look at ourselves from a new perspective. The Group will advocate for the use of I30 funding to support this where necessary. e.g. 2 members of staff attended the WONKHE Student conference in 2024.

We ran a Library Student Sentiment Survey at the end of 2024 to provide the opportunity for students to tell us what they think about the Library and make suggestions on how we can improve.

The My Research Essentials programme and its communities help researchers navigate the growing Open Research movement and the ways in which it can help them develop their careers – in academic and academic-related pathways.

We focused time and energy in to redesigning and relaunching Subject Guides to improve discoverability of our collections. A new governance for the Guides has been established and is managed within the Library’s Collections Engagement Group.

We made sure that all Manchester Digital Collections records are now discoverable via LibrarySearch, which merges our digital special collections seamlessly with the library's main search tool. We have launched a number of collections on MDC to support greater diversity, such as the Pali, Ethiopic and Samaritan manuscripts collections. Finally, we introduced the Golden Mummies online exhibition, which brings in an entire exhibition from the Manchester Museum's collections, making them more discoverable for students.

The University of Manchester Library Student Team and Jennie Blake won the prestigious Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE) in 2024 and were part of the University team who won a Times Higher Education award for outstanding student support focused on the original cost of living work.

Library Student Team’s work recognised with a CATE which sparked more extensive work within Faculties (FSE, FBMH) and an expansion of the Team to allow for support of the student digital skills pilot.

The Library has been recognised as leaders for our work on the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower Scheme which included working with DASS on effective practice for implementing the commitment.

As part of the Next Chapter renovations project in the John Rylands Library, we created a new, flexible space for teaching, learning, and events. This space comes equipped with a large overhead visualiser for detailed work on collection items, and multiple screens to facilitate group work. Thanks to the size of the room (occupancy of up to 60 people) and the new technology, we can receive larger groups of students and conduct hybrid teaching, allowing us to provide an improved experience for a diverse range of students.

The Library contributed to the drafts for TEF and APP, with Library activities recognised in both these submissions. We are also working to align Library activities with T&L process and strategic work at SLT level.

The new Staff Learning & development plan is designed to provide all Library staff with access to a wide range of high-quality training opportunities, ensuring consistency and excellence in the student experience.

We have been working in partnership with the Universities Immigration, Visa Check-in and Student Services Teams to support their activities in the Library.

Open Access monographs are academic books focusing on a specific subject or research question, which is free to read online with no price and permission barriers. Despite the slow pace of change across the sector and challenges to embedding Open Access for monographs, The University of Manchester Library has actively supported Manchester authors to publish their longform outputs Open Access.

The Muriel Stott redevelopment is scheduled for summer 2025, to be completed in time for the start of Semester 1. Designs have been developed with student need at the forefront. Student wellbeing is at the core of designs and accessibility and environmental sustainability have also been major considerations in the planning.