About the Library

The Manchester Metropolitan University Library is at the heart of the University’s main campus. It’s a busy, modern library, set up over six floors, and open 24/7 during term time. Its comprehensive collection includes over one million books, eBooks, and journals supporting learning, teaching, and research in all subject areas. The team of expert librarians provides outstanding levels of support across five faculties and 37,000 students.

The Library’s highly skilled and collaborative team manages unique resources that include the awardwinning North West Film Archive, home of the moving image heritage of the North West of England, as well as the Special Collections which showcase the fine and decorative artifacts central to the University’s artistic culture and heritage. The recently opened Manchester Poetry Library is the fourth library of its kind in the UK and the first within a university. It offers an extensive range of poetry inthe many languages spoken in Manchester.

Before – 3 days on average to manually fulfill a request

In the past, fulfilling a single borrowing request would take days at MMU. The Library manually handled communication between the lending institutions and the students. This caused serious inefficiencies and frustration:

“Before joining RapidILL (and OCLC’s WMS in 2021) we largely relied on sourcing articles and chapters for our users solely from UK institutions. In addition, the process was very manual – involving emailing one potential lending library to the next before locating a suitable supplier. Our turnaround time averaged around 3 days.”

After – Automatically delivering titles in 24 hours or less

Will and the Library staff saw their interlibrary-loan turnaround times significantly drop. Behind the scenes, RapidILL connects Will’s Library to more than 600 community members, including 1/3 of all UK academic libraries. RapidILL automatically distributes the requests among the different libraries. As a result, libraries fulfill 97% of the requests automatically, in 10 hours on average:

“RapidILL not only optimises staff time through its automated workflow, which speeds up how we process new borrower requests, but our users can now expect to receive the majority of their urgent research articles and chapters in 24 hours or less.”

Enabling students to borrow as many titles as they need

How many resource-sharing fees does a library typically manage every month? Peer-to-peer transactions, monthly journal subscriptions, and copyright fees are only a few examples.

RapidILL is built on the principle of “reciprocity.” This principle allows libraries to join groups called pods to share titles without charging each other. The Library pays one RapidILL annual fee, without having to worry about the number of requests student place:

“Because we pay a set fee annually for RapidILL, we now have no limits on the number of articles and chapters our users can request. Beforehand, we had caps of between 15 and 30 items per-year (depending on whether the requesting user was a student or staff member).”

Accessing the resources of the most renowned institutions

The success of a library heavily depends on the range and quality of the resources it offers. By joining the Ex Libris’ extensive resource-sharing community, Will has opened his Library up to a world of resources. From the collections of community colleges to those of Ivy Leagues, MMU now leverages millions of global titles:

“[RapidILL’s] global reach – which includes some Ivy Leagues in the States amongst other research-intensive institutions around the globe – improves our success rate in sourcing items for our requesters. In short, we say no to our users less.”

Leaving a footprint on the global research landscape

Libraries aren’t only repositories of knowledge. They also play an active role in shaping and supporting research culture on a global scale. Joining the resource-sharing community has allowed Will’s Library to collaborate with others. Their own titles are now accessible worldwide:

“As we also share articles and chapters from our own catalogue with other libraries via RapidILL – we can argue that our collections play an important role in shaping and supporting research culture globally.”

What’s the difference between RapidILL and Rapido?

Ex Libris unifies its resource-sharing community under Rapido. Rapido offers the automation capabilities of RapidILL, while making it easier for patrons to borrow titles.