Members of the RapidILL working group are happy to report that the ELUNA Annual Meeting was an informative and enjoyable time. We gained valuable insight into RapidILL’s product roadmap, recruited new members to the working group for this upcoming year, and got to spend time together in-person discussing our work and future in ways that are limited in online meetings.
Many members of the RapidILL working group attended a presentation titled “Working Together: How RapidILL Built Bridges” by Jessica Hartwigsen from California State University, Office of the Chancellor. For those more familiar with RapidILL, we know that we communicate our holdings information for lending using a controlled vocabulary of statuses in an electronic collection’s Internal Description field. In her presentation, Hartwigsen noted that because of this requirement, many schools in the California State University had questions about where to find the note and how to locate licensing information about their e-resources. From here, bridges were built across system-wide committees to not only communicate this requirement for RapidILL holdings information, but also spearheaded a much larger project to get consistent licensing information populated in Alma across the system. On behalf of the working group, we’d like to thank Jessica Hartwigsen for her presentation. Even though “this [was] an e-resources presentation with RapidILL in the title,” it demonstrated the importance of breaking down siloes in an organization and how collaborating across departments, committees, and institutions can be of tremendous value!”