Herding Cats: Implementing Primo for the Orbis-Cascade Alliance Consortium

Abstract

The Orbis-Cascade Alliance, a consortium of 37 academic libraries, is implementing a blended Primo environment for its members. The blended Primo environment combines a single Primo installation with many configuration decisions and rules managed at the installation level, while also offering individual libraries the flexibility to make many customization and interfaces decisions to best meet the needs of their own institutions. We will discuss how the Alliance is developing management and oversight of the consortial Primo environment, the implementation decisions made by libraries in each of four cohorts of libraries as they migrate to Primo, the challenges and lessons learned from our experiences, and how we are working with Ex Libris to ensure that the we are able to continue to meet the changing needs of our users.