Academic libraries are increasingly moving toward an intentional role in ensuring that students can access the course materials they need to succeed. But delivering on that promise is increasingly complex. Libraries must keep pace with rapidly shifting course requirements, tightening budgets, and growing expectations for transparency and impact. When course‑related requests arrive through scattered emails, forms, spreadsheets, and hallway conversations, it becomes harder for libraries to make timely, well-informed decisions about what to purchase and how to support student learning. Course demand moves more quickly than library turnaround times can accommodate: syllabi change late, new sections open unexpectedly, and preferred formats can shift per instructor, resulting in a frustrating experience for both faculty and library teams.
Libraries need workflows that enable:
- faster time-to-fulfilment for teaching materials
- fewer manual handoffs between course reserves and acquisitions
- better decision-making around format, licensing, and quantities
- less administrative burden on faculty and staff
And ideally — they need all of this in one consistent system.
Leganto & Rialto: one continuous workflow
Leganto and Rialto, both built within the Alma platform, work together to enable a seamless workflow from reading list creation to purchase and fulfilment.
Step 1: Faculty build reading lists in Leganto — and requests are centralized
Leganto provides the library unified view of course materials, making it easy to see what’s been assigned, how it matches current holdings, and how those materials are used within the course. It also eliminates the need for multiple emails and forms for requesting teaching materials.
Step 2: Rialto becomes “course-aware” — surfacing course materials inside the marketplace
Rialto provides the library with a comprehensive, vendor neutral marketplace of over 47 million unique titles. Within which, library staff are provided real-time display of library activity, holdings, resource sharing availability, and budget information. Rialto further enables efficiencies with automatic purchase order line creation at point of purchase. Leganto data is visible within Rialto, including the courses using the title, course dates (current or future), and whether a resource is required or optional. Acquisitions staff can easily search Rialto for course materials which need to be purchased, such as required resources the library doesn’t already hold. At the same time, when they’re browsing or evaluating titles for other purposes, they can immediately see when an item is assigned in a course, giving the additional context they need to make better purchasing decisions.
Step 3: Search and purchase directly from the reading list — without leaving the workflow
Library staff can also easily purchase specific titles for courses. While processing course resource lists, the staff user can navigate to the marketplace view of any title on the list, find the best offer, and complete the purchase process as a seamless workflow. Ex Libris Knowledge Center
This is especially powerful because:
- Workflow is initiated directly from the course resource list
- Staff spend less time copying data and navigating across systems
- Acquisitions teams can react faster to instructors’ requests
Step 4: Citations in Leganto and Alma show up-to-date inventory
When a purchased title is required for a course, the citations are automatically associated to that purchase, and newly created or updated inventory is attached directly to citations in Leganto. Now you no longer need to worry about separately updating instructors or students when you have purchased a new title for a course.
The result:
- No confusing “did we order this?” loops
- Fewer status update emails
- Quicker access for instructors and students
The real-world impact: Faster fulfillment, fewer keystrokes, better collaboration
Rialto enables staff collaboration through shared selections, comments, lists, tagging — reducing duplication and avoiding separate email threads.
Library collections as a driver of student success
As libraries increasingly align their collections with course needs, their investments are playing a more visible and measurable role in supporting student access, learning, and overall success. By measuring how well their collections support teaching and learning, and by demonstrating the return on investment of collection spending, libraries are increasingly able to show their essential value to both students and the institution.
Leganto and Rialto together create a model where acquisitions become:
- proactive rather than reactive
- rooted in data
- tied to clear evidence of student need
- And most importantly: it enables libraries to better serve their users.
