ELUNA 2024 has come and gone, and it was a very informative conference for all that were able to attend. Sessions on resource sharing were excellent, and the Rapido Working Group update proved to generate quite a bit of interesting discussion.
Outgoing Rapido Working Group chair Chris Lee started the group’s ELUNA 2024 update with a quick summary of accomplishments over the last year. Since the group is quite new, many of its accomplishments were focused on getting the group on the same footing as other working groups underneath the ELUNA umbrella, including introducing two-year terms, the planned introduction of vice chair / vice enhancement coordinator positions, and completing the first NERS enhancement process for Rapido. The group also consulted with Ex Libris on updates related to bugs, request processes and invoicing.
Chris then provided a list of potential goals and projects for 2024/2025. Potential projects include working with Ex Libris to clean up documentation, working on improving issue reporting outside of Salesforce so that institutions can get a better sense for known issues, and hosting presentations on creating peer-to-peer ISO-based resource sharing connections. More definitively, the group will continue to provide advice to Ex Libris on whether Rapido and RapidILL should have separate NERS enhancement voting processes. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to [email protected] with any ideas you have for the group in this coming year.
The rest of the Rapido Working Group update consisted of an open discussion of ideas and issues related to Rapido. Judith Fraenkel and Katie Birch from Ex Libris provided more information about future ebook requesting functionality in Rapido, which will function through pods that Ex Libris will create. Pod request tiles will reflect information on whether eBooks can be downloaded or whether they are just read-only. It was not clear yet whether display logic that corresponded to ebook Rapido request tiles would be available when these ebook pods launch. The question was asked as to why more ebooks weren’t DRM-free, and Katie expressed the hope that as publishers see DRM-free ebooks aren’t damaging their business, they will start allowing for that more.
An attendee expressed interest in hybrid pods (pods that consist of both Rapido and non-Rapido institutions) and Meghann Weldon at Ex Libris said that could make for a good webinar for the group to help facilitate.
A handful of pain points were also discussed in the concluding minutes of the session, including the external ID for Rapido requests sometimes being too long for UPS, and the call number not always getting included in the Excel spreadsheet that’s created when requests in the Rapido user interface are exported. To address the former issue, outgoing chair Christopher Lee suggested using the group identifier barcode instead of the external ID.
Drew Parker
Current chair, Rapido Working Group