In early 2017, Thomas Cooper Library’s seventeen year old home-grown online purchase request system ceased functioning. The online purchase request system supports workflow management of faculty and patron monographic order requests by Collection Development, Acquisitions, and Library Liaisons. While traditional monographic order workflows and support are often thought of as legacy services, the need to effectively and efficiently manage these requests has never been more pressing. Evidence based acquisitions, patron driven acquisitions, and approval plans cast a wide net, addressing broad based collection building. Faculty and patron driven title-by-title monograph requests represent unique purchases that directly support teaching and research while promoting library-campus community relationships. The demise of our old system provided us the opportunity to reflect on library-wide change in the intervening seventeen years, how we position this service throughout the library, and the requirements needed in a new system to address our current and future needs. With both a commercial and University IT built software solution out of financial reach, we set about building our own system using library IT resources. Join us as we discuss how we went from a deceased seventeen year old system to a scalable ticket-based solution that elegantly addresses staff and community needs. We will share the experiences and challenges we encountered as we travelled this path including: how we isolated our essential system requirements, how that process helped us define our software solution, what resources were required to undertake this project, what we’ve learned, and how our journey can be adapted by other libraries.
