The University
of Edinburgh
With the Leganto and Rialto implementation, the University of Edinburgh library
has increased its efciency in managing resource lists and acquisitions and has
strengthened interdepartmental collaboration.
The Leganto-Rialto
workow: The key
to streamlining the
purchase of course
materials
The University of Edinburgh has been using the Ex Libris
Leganto® course resource list solution since 2017. The
workow for processing course resource lists was set at
that time and has worked well for the various teams using
the solution: the Library Learning Services team, which
reviews lists and ags citations for other teams to work on;
the High Use Books team, which places books on short-
term loan; the E-reserve team, which provides copyright-
compliant scans; and the Acquisitions team, which
manages book and e-book purchases and negotiations for
key materials.
In 2019, the University of Edinburgh joined a global group
of development partners to work with ProQuest on the
Rialto™ academic marketplace, which offers libraries a
range of acquisition models. Because course resource
needs make up a great part of the acquisition requests,
the team of development partners directed much of its
attention to the integrated Leganto-Rialto workow.
Communicating with Academics
The university library leverages the Leganto solution to
determine what resources are required for courses and
the extent to which the library collection supports the
resource requirements. “As a one-stop shop with a single
point of entry for library collection services, Leganto saves
time,” explains Library Learning Services Manager Angela
Laurins at the University of Edinburgh library. “Academic
staff members no longer have to send multiple emails and
complete a variety of forms to request teaching materials.”
Although there is still no formal mandate requiring the use
of Leganto, it is the Library’s preferred route for making
requests, and the teaching staff is strongly encouraged to
take this route.
"As soon as we implemented Leganto,” adds Laurins,
“we began using it to manage informed purchases of
materials for teaching, with our integrated, cross-team
workow seamlessly handling requests. To understand
which resources the library needs to acquire for courses,
the librarians can view the required materials alongside
holdings information—a true time-saver!”
When learning moved online in 2020 because of the
COVID-19 pandemic, the power of the Leganto solution as
an acquisition tool became even more evident. Executing
a strategy to make more e-resources available, the Library
Learning Services team managed over 12,000 requests via
Leganto during the 2020-2021 academic year.
“As soon as we implemented Leganto, we began using it to manage
informed purchases of materials for teaching, with our integrated,
cross-team workow seamlessly handling requests.”
Angela Laurins, Library Learning Services Manager
About University of Edinburgh
A member of the elite Russell Group of
universities, the University of Edinburgh is a
world-leading center of academic excellence.
With a history dating back to 1583, it is one of the
UK’s oldest universities and Scotland’s largest.
Edinburgh’s graduates have been awarded
Nobel prizes, won Olympic medals, traveled
into space, and written some of the world’s
most-read books. Among former students are
naturalist Charles Darwin, philosopher David
Hume, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Innovations linked to Edinburgh include the
tuberculosis vaccine, and Dolly the Sheep, the
world’s first cloned mammal.
Edinburgh provides a high-quality learning and
teaching environment for almost
2
7,000 undergraduates, more than 12,900
taught postgraduates, and 5,845 research
postgraduates. The library’s holdings consist of
over 3.8 million books, e books, and e journals,
with print resources housed in the purposebuilt
eight-story Main Library building at George
Square.
Images are reproduced with permission of the University of Edinburgh
"Rialto has been a great time saver by automating many of these
processes and minimizing the number of keystrokes they require."
Elize Rowan, Content Acquisition & Access Manager
The academic staff creates resource lists that include all
types of materials, and the Leganto solution automatically
checks resources in the library collection. The Library
Learning Services team under Laurins has streamlined
the workow between the library and the academic
staff by asking academics to tag resource list citations
with the resource’s priority (essential, recommended, or
further reading and to highlight if a digitization or
purchase is required (again using tags and adding notes
via Leganto’s Library discussion.. The librarians review the
reading list in the Ex Libris Alma® interface (the Alma
platform is the infrastructure on which the Leganto
solution is built and identifies candidates for digitization
or purchase. Once the Library Learning Services team has
reviewed the resource lists, relevant resources are pushed
through to the Acquisitions team for purchasing or the E-
reserve team for providing copyright-compliant scans.
Although the library relies on the Copyright Licensing
Agency’s Digital Content Store (CLA DCS) to manage
scans, digitization requests are first processed as
acquisition requests to accommodate the library’s policy of
e-book first.
“The option to filter the citations by reading-list tags is
incredibly useful when you are working through lists that
are sometimes hundreds of items long,” says Laurins. “You
can really focus on those citations that you need to take
action on. In addition, all the metadata has been pulled
through automatically by Leganto, so we don't have to edit
anything there.”
Innovating with Rialto
University of Edinburgh Content Acquisition & Access
Manager Elize Rowan led the team that collaborated with
ProQuest and Ex Libris developers as part of the Rialto
development partnership. “It made sense for us to be a
development partner, given that ProQuest is our main
supplier of both print materials and e-books,” comments
Rowan. “We knew that our acquisition workflow had a
number of pain points, and anything that was going to
deliver some relief from the inefficiencies was worth our
time.”
Once the university went live with the Rialto solution,
in early 2020, the library worked to refine the flow of
information between the Leganto and Rialto services. The
outcome was a significant decrease in costs related to staff
hours in the acquisition workflow and time to acquisition.
Today the entire acquisition workflow takes place on
the Ex Libris higher-ed platform. When the Acquisitions
team receives an order, the library staff sees both the
Rialto marketplace and the library’s own holdings, with
background information from the purchase request
(including information from the reading list) available in a
pop-out panel. After the purchase is executed through the
Rialto service, the faculty member who made the request
is automatically updated.
The Ex Libris Leganto course resource list
solution affords libraries a greater role in
teaching and learning and streamlines the
workows between the academic staff and
librarians.
The innovative ProQuest Rialto academic
marketplace provides a single, integrated
experience enabling libraries to make
evidence-based, data-driven selection and
acquisition decisions.
The Power of a Unied System
In the past, the Library Learning Services team occasionally
struggled to discover the status of an order, but now Rialto
noties the team when an order is conrmed. An alert
tab on the reading list screen shows when the purchase
request was submitted. “And even more useful,” Laurins
says, “I can see whether the request was rejected or
approved. As someone who doesn’t have access to the
acquisition end of things, I nd it incredibly helpful to
be able to view the outcome of my requests. Of course,
once the purchase request is complete, the e-book is
automatically activated and becomes available to students
in the Leganto interface.”
Elize Rowan notes that the new workow has cut the time
that it takes to place an order in half—from 11 minutes
to about ve or six minutes. “Using Rialto as part of our
purchase request fulllment has delivered multiple
efciencies,” she explains. “The single intuitive interface
enables us to search the marketplace, see what is already
in our holdings, and follow through to place an order,
all on one screen. Rialto has been a great time saver by
automating many of these processes and minimizing the
number of keystrokes they require.”
Since the pandemic-mandated shift to online teaching
and learning, the University of Edinburgh, like most
academic institutions, has focused on providing as much
online content as possible. “We committed to checking
e-book availability for all resources that the staff marked
as essential or recommended,” says Rowan. “We also—for
the rst time—proactively identied essential-tagged book
chapters for digitization and checked for e-book availability
before providing a scan.” Clearly, cutting the processing
time in half has had a signicant impact on the handling
of the 12,000 requests submitted via the Leganto solution,
each of which is individually processed by the Acquisitions
team.
About Ex Libris
Ex Libris, a ProQuest company, is a leading global provider of cloud-based solutions
that enable institutions and their users to create, manage, and share knowledge.
In close collaboration with its customers and the broader community, Ex Libris
develops solutions that increase library productivity, maximize the impact of
research activities, enhance teaching and learning, and drive student mobile
engagement. Ex Libris serves over 7,500 customers in 90 countries. For more
information, see our website and join us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitt
About ProQuest
ProQuest, a global EdTech leader, supports the most important work in the world’s
research and learning communities. Our company curates six centuries of content
- the world’s largest collection of ebooks, journals, primary sources, dissertations,
news and video - and builds powerful workow solutions to help libraries acquire
and grow collections that inspire extraordinary outcomes. ProQuest products and
services are used in academic, K-12, public, corporate, and government libraries in
150 countries.
