In the world of ILL, nothing ever stands still and Durham’s experience with a single resource request form (FIL Journal, issue 70, February 2022, pages 21-25) is certainly no exception. During the COVID pandemic we set up a single form to cut through the confusion of all the services and request methods we had in operation at the time. Students just needed to tell staff what they wanted, and our triage team would check requests and forward them on to Customer Services, ILL or Acquisitions to satisfy the request.
Jump forward and the situation has completely changed. Panic over COVID has waned and we’re no longer going into complete lockdown whenever a new wave hits us. Students are heading back to campus and libraries are scaling back on the additional services they offer. When COVID struck, Durham was in the throes of tendering for a new library management system, so this was dusted off and in August 2022 we ended up with a sparkly new Alma system. Compared to our previous system Alma is unbelievably complex. To keep things simple the decision was taken fairly early on to just go with the out of the box request forms available in Alma, rather than try to design another single request form which would do everything the old one did, plus automate the triage process and push the data into the separate request forms.
Knowing that we would be moving back to individual request forms we made sure that the forms were clearly visible, conveniently placed and we planned plenty of user information advertising the changes. As soon as we went live with Alma and put the new forms into operation, we started getting compliments (particularly from lecturers) about how simple and fast the new service was. Part of this will be because we automated RapidILL, so article requests with sufficient information would be shunted into RapidILL without any ILL staff intervention and supplied direct to the user at any time of the day or night. For these requests we effectively have a 24/7 service, rather than 9-5pm, Monday-Friday. Cutting out the time the requests languished in the triage team email will have helped dramatically. When designing the single request form, we were overly optimistic about how quick the triage process would be. In practice this ended up a low priority task and junior staff were often whisked away to do other work when other areas were short staffed. It wasn’t unusual for requests to take 6 – 10 hours to reach ILL and there were days (too many of them) when no requests were forwarded to us at all. Getting requests feeding directly into Alma was a relief and our customers have certainly noticed the difference.
So, my conclusions having tried a one-stop-form? (And I should stress here that this is only my personal opinion.) While the students initially cried out that the services were too complicated, they haven’t complained when we withdrew the single form. They are using a smaller range of services and are coping fine without the extra help. Lecturers prefer the individual forms because they know what they want and can go straight to the service they need, without the need to add extra notes to the request to ensure that the library buys, rather than borrows, the title. (Too many mistakes happened that way.) As an interim measure, the single form was useful at a time where there was too much confusion in everyday life, with lockdown rules changing on an almost daily basis, but the format we were forced to use was massively staff-time intensive. Our experience of using the single form has had its benefits: it caused a fundamental change in how we operate, and teams are now more relaxed about passing requests about internally. For the ILL team, at this current time, the single forms are the best option and current customer feedback seems to back this up.
In short, while you can change services due to public outcry, you’ll never be able to please everyone at the same time, and as the situation changes you have to be flexible and just do the best you can. In an ideal world it would be lovely to have a single form which students could use (with automated triage this time, to keep things speedy) running alongside individual service forms for the expert users who know exactly which service they want. For me, that’ll have to stay a fantasy for the time being, but it’s definitely on my wishlist for the future.