Challenge:
“The library has had the same collections budget for many years and we were looking at making cuts to collections to make room for inflation. But first, we evaluated our library systems for software that would allow us to decrease spending without downgrading the user experience.”
East Tennessee State University
Institution: East Tennessee State University
Established: 1911
Students: 13,500
Specialties: Health sciences and Appalachian studies
Location: Tennessee
Adapting to the library-user needs
The Sherrod Library at East Tennessee State University had used ILLiad for interlibrary loans for more than 20 years. However, they felt ready to migrate to a new system if that also meant improving services to users. According to Jennifer Young, Acquisitions & Access Services Coordinator:
“We regularly evaluate our services to incorporate feedback and adapt to user needs. Users had Primo library accounts but needed separate ILLiad accounts to manage borrowed items. They would utilize a services link in the Primo record to be redirected to submit the request on the ILLiad system. We felt the two-system process was confusing to the end user and did very little to educate or promote the importance of Interlibrary Loan for their research needs.”
In addition to uplifting the ILL experience for users, there was also a desire to enable more ways of working remotely as a result of the COVID pandemic. There was a financial incentive as well, shares Young:
“The library has had the same collections budget for many years and we were looking at making cuts to collections to make room for inflation. However, we first evaluated our library systems to find software that would allow us to decrease spending without downgrading the user experience. “
A successful two-month transition
The library’s attention was drawn to Rapido. Rapido would allow the library to offer access to resources shared by other libraries while allowing users to submit borrowing requests from within the Primo discovery layer. That makes the process as seamless as accessing items in the library’s own collection. As Young recalls, the library transitioned to Rapido as their primary interlibrary loan system the same day they sunsetted their previous ILL system:
“We had our share of transition pains, of course, but the migration was successful overall. We were able to transition to using Rapido with only a two-month overlap with our WorldShare ILL subscription and no overlap with our ILLiad access. We went live with Rapido the day our ILLiad subscription ended.”
Positive feedback from users
Young reports, “Library users at East Tennessee have enjoyed the integration within Primo that Rapido provides. We have heard from students and faculty that the request process is easier. They also enjoy the quick turnaround times provided by the RapidILL network; our turnaround time for filling digital requests has stayed consistent at 10 hours on average. We receive a lot of compliments regarding the speed of article requests. Users enjoy having their library requests managed in the Primo library card and being able to see when a book has shipped. All the feedback we have received has been verbal or through word of mouth from our circulation staff or reference librarians. However, we plan to conduct a user survey in 2025 to gather more direct feedback.”
Integrated systems and custom insights for staf
While the library has seen increases in borrowing requests for all material types, Young relates that the ability to see and manage the different types of requests in one place helped staff handle the requests with ease:
“On the lending side, staff have enjoyed the integration in Alma. The transition to Rapido has allowed our staff member who handles physical lending to easily manage those requests in the same system, using similar workflows. On the borrowing side, the biggest improvement is the ease of creating custom sets for specific types of requests that need to be handled separately. We have also enjoyed the label functionality. We requested a list of textbook ISBNs from our bookstore and created a mediation rule in Rapido to label textbook requests. We then run reports to find out how many students request them and the disciplines where this is more prevalent. Our Digital Scholarship Librarian plans to use the data to identify courses to reach out to regarding open-access textbooks.”
User-centric service goal achieved
Summarizes Young: “Our primary goal is to offer a service that is both usercentered and cost-effective. We’ve streamlined our requesting, processing, and delivery of materials to ensure timely access with a seamless and userfriendly experience.”
Before Rapido:
After implementing Rapido:
Before Rapido:
After implementing Rapido:
