Understanding Libraries and How They Work (Sample technical documentation with video!)

Note: All documentation is available for public consumption. Original article can be found here.

Did you know that Vector Solutions manages thousands among thousands of courses? With so much content, it’s important to keep things succinct and organized. That’s why Vector Solutions organizes courses into what we call Libraries.

What Exactly Is a Library?

A Library contains any number of courses that pertain to a specific industry. When configuring your site, your Account Manager will allocate the appropriate Libraries needed for your organization. For instance, if your organization works in construction, then you probably don’t have much use for a Library containing courses on fighting fires and burn tower training. This ensures that your site will only have access to the lessons that your users will need.

Once your Libraries are set, your Course Catalog will then be populated with the appropriate titles. It is important to note that Libraries do not assign courses to users. Rather, Libraries simply make the courses available for creating enrollments within your site.

Course Packages, on the other hand, can be built based on the courses that you make available from your Libraries and then can be assigned out as enrollments.

Assigning Libraries to Users

Although your site will only receive Libraries that are pertinent to your users, you may still need to classify which users have access to which content. For example, let’s say you’re the administrator for a large construction organization. Users in human resources won’t be taking the same courses as the users who work in construction, so there’s still a need to allocate who will see which courses. Libraries can be assigned to individual users or to groups of users.

To assign a Library to a group of users, access User Library Assignment from Users & Org:

Once inside, you will see a list of Libraries that have been made available to your site by your Account Manager:

You will see that each Library has its own name and ID number, but there are a few other points of interest here:

You will see that each Library has its own name and ID number, but there are a few other points of interest here:

  1. Selection Checkbox: Select the checkboxes of the Libraries you wish to assign.
  2. Courses: This is the number of courses that are included within the selected Library.
  3. Hours: This is the amount of hours that the courses within the selected library is worth.

We’re only selecting one Library and we are going to assign it to a User Group containing construction specialists. Scroll down to select users:

You may also select a User Team or choose individual users to assign the Library to. Once you have made your selections, click the Assign Selected button.

Note: You cannot remove a user from a Library assignment after this process has been completed. Contact your Account Manager to make these changes if necessary.

Once the confirmation is complete, you will see a results panel to see who has gained access to the Library in question. In this case, the User Group only had two users, but they now have access to the Construction & Trades Library:

To take this one step further, let’s do a search for the user Jean Giacomo. In his results, we’ll see the Libraries that he has access to, including the Construction & Trades Library that we just assigned to him:

Assigning Libraries to Individuals in their user Profile

There’s a more direct route to assign Libraries to users. If we enter a user’s profile and look into their Administration tab, we’ll find a section called Assign Library:

Click Search for a complete list of the Libraries in your company’s contract and then use the Add and Remove Checked Items buttons to assign the Library. As you can see, the Construction & Trades Library is already included in this user’s profile.

So, What Does This Mean?

Once a Library is assigned to a user, they now have access to those courses from within the Course Catalog or via Assigned Training Management. Assigning a Library to a user does not mean that they are being assigned courses — quite the opposite. It merely means they are being assigned access to a collection of courses that can be enrolled in.

Jump to another article to learn more:

Exploring the Course Catalog (link retracted)

Creating a Course Package (link retracted)

Assigned Training Management Overview (link retracted)