Are there plans to allow list collaborators to determine whether the initial display is collapsed or expanded? Our lecturers would appreciate having the option to customise this.

This is becoming the no.1 nuisance to Staff and Student users in the feedback we are receiving. For many lists there are 12 sections for the 12 weeks of semester reflecting Seminars and Lectures or just the weeks themselves. It simply makes no sense at all as a user to show everything all at once since it immediately forces them to scroll before they even understand the structure of what they are viewing.

As regards UX, section-level permalinks allow selective collapse/expansion of a list, showing only the relevant content, and no other section is expanded, so why should the list level be any different?
It seems reasonable that a default section display behaviour could be configured for each institution. From our user feedback and our own staff comments from creating and editing lists the UX is actively poor if all sections are expanded and there are more than 3 sections.

This idea is an important display design issue for supporting understanding and interactions with detailed structured lists. The Library thinks so, students tell us so, and academic staff are confused as to why it auto-expands by default.
No previous service which has sections we have ever used in 15 years has defaulted to open, so for our lists (higher education research-led teaching institution) this is not good! It causes confusion in the UI.

Alternatively display a help bubble which highlights the collapse sections icon every time a student/instructor enters a list. Students do not find this facility themselves but we can see the reluctance of Ex Libris not to collapse the sections automatically on the grounds of user experience.

The collapsed list section titles act like an index or table of contents to a list overall, so it is really much more helpful to present the collapsed list structure to an end user, so they have a visual summary of the contents and can determine which section/s to expand.

For any list which has >1 section it would generally seem better to auto-collapse the whole list. As much as anything the space on screen is an issue - for a list which has 2 sections, and each section has >2 items soon starts to fill the screen. We find many lists have 5-12 sections each with multiple items. The only alternative is to create multiple lists for a course.