When staff create or edit patron records, Alma currently accepts leading or trailing spaces in the first name and last name fields. These spaces make the name technically unique, so the duplicate warning mechanism does not recognize the record as a duplicate. This results in poor data quality, as duplicate records are created without warning.

Proposed enhancement:
• Automatically remove any leading or trailing spaces in the first name and last name fields when a patron record is created or updated.
• Alternatively, prevent staff from entering leading or trailing spaces in these fields from the beginning.

This enhancement would significantly reduce the risk of duplicate records, improve data consistency, and save staff time spent on manual cleanup.