Small Changes, Real Impact: Taking Community Issues Forward
By Kip A. Darling
In late 2025, a small but persistent issue showed up in the Alma Resource Sharing workflow with integrated RapidILL.
This example highlights how issues identified in day-to-day practice can be shared through the community and taken forward in a way that leads to wider improvements.
When newly received requests were populated in Alma, a DOI entered as a full URL (for example, https://doi.org/…) did not trigger automatic population of other bibliographic details, such as the ISSN. The shorter DOI format (10…) worked as expected.
The key issue was not just the formatting. It was the impact on automation.
If a user submitted a request with a full DOI URL, the system could not always complete the process automatically. Where insufficient metadata existed for RapidILL to accept the request, it would stop and move into a mediation queue, requiring staff intervention.
This meant that requests submitted outside staffed hours, such as evenings, weekends, or holidays, were delayed unnecessarily. Requests that should have gone straight through were instead held until someone was available to intervene. This is the kind of issue that is easy to work around locally, but has a wider impact when it happens regularly.
The issue was shared with colleagues in the IGeLU RapidILL Working Group. Led by Dr Lynne Porat, further testing across institutions helped confirm that this was not a local setup issue, but something affecting the wider community.
A support case was then raised with Ex Libris, supported by clear examples and testing. The issue was taken forward by their development team, and a fix was scheduled for the April 2026 Alma release.
Following that release, testing shows that both DOI formats now work as expected, and requests can once again move through the workflow without interruption.
Why this matters
This is a small fix, but it makes a real difference.
When automation works, requests can be processed quickly, including outside normal working hours. When it breaks, even in small ways, delays build up and staff have to step in to fix things manually.
Fixing this issue helps to:
- keep requests moving without staff intervention
- avoid delays outside staffed hours
- reduce manual corrections
- make the workflow more reliable
The role of community and partnership
This example shows how sharing issues and working on them together can lead to real improvements.
The IGeLU RapidILL Working Group helped test and confirm the problem across institutions and supported the evidence behind the case. That made it easier to show that this was not just a local issue, but something worth fixing at system level.
It also shows the importance of responsive vendor support. Once the issue was clearly described, it was taken forward and resolved.
Many improvements are raised through formal channels such as Idea Exchange and CERV, alongside work identified and supported through practitioner communities.
This is one example of the kind of work being taken forward across the community, where small, practical issues are identified and improved for the benefit of all.
Further examples of RapidILL Working Group improvements
Alongside this issue, further ideas have been taken forward to improve resource sharing workflows.
One recent enhancement allows libraries to configure an additional information field within request forms. This enables users to provide more detail for digital requests, which is then shared with lending libraries. Following significant work to champion this enhancement, it was released in Rapido in April 2026 and is scheduled to be rolled out to RapidILL users in May.
There is also ongoing work examining how Author and Editor data is routed in lending requests, following cases where metadata has not been mapped to the expected fields.
These improvements are small in isolation, but they help to reduce friction, improve data quality, and support more consistent processing across systems.
A practical takeaway
If something in your workflow is not behaving as expected, it is worth checking whether others are seeing the same thing.
Raising it, testing it, and sharing it can turn a local workaround into a wider fix.
Ongoing improvements
This is not about a single change, but about the steady work of improving how systems behave in practice.
Each of these adjustments removes a point of friction, whether that is improving automation, clarifying data, or making requests easier to process.
Individually, these changes are small. Taken together, they help services run more smoothly, reduce delays, and support a more reliable experience for both staff and users.
With thanks to colleagues who continue to raise, test, and take forward improvements on behalf of the community.
Opportunity to get involved
Does your library use RapidILL? If you have an interest in how it works in practice and would like to contribute to improving the system for the wider community, there is currently an opportunity to get involved.
The IGeLU RapidILL Working Group is looking to strengthen UK representation and welcomes expressions of interest from colleagues who would like to contribute their experience and insight.
If this is something you might be interested in, you are welcome to reach out to Dr Lynne Porat via her contact details on the RapidILL Working Group webpage.
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.