1. Committee appointed May, 96. Each institution had one committee representative. Each rep. was repsonsible for representing the views of all of their branches and public service units on their campus: it was ok to represent more than one viewpoint, though when it came time to voting, each rep. had only one vote.

   Though most of us had never met each other in person, we had experience working together via e-mail on the on-site reciprocal borrowing agreement.

   A listserv was set up for the discussion of Orbis borrowing issues. Any staff (whether they worked at a circulation desk or not) was encouraged to particiapte in the listserv discussion, but when a vote was taken, only the rep. from that site could participate.

2. Charge: Recommend Orbis borrowing implementation procedures.

3. Working in a Consortium: The Orbis Consortium had challenging questions to work through as we resolved issues:
   • There is a very large and sometimes unfriendly geographic area separating many of the sites, making in-person meetings difficult.
   • The consortium is mix of public and private institutions (with a variety of rules and guidelines and varying institution missions under which each institution must work.)
   • There is a variety in size of institutions.
   • Some libraries have a large staff with specialized training and responsibilities; others have smaller staff who have multiple responsibilities
   • Some institutions run on a semester calendar, others on a quarter, and some have libraries which run on both (law libraries on semesters, other libraries on quarters)
   • Orbis is self funding: each site wants to get the best value for their dollars for their own communities),
   • Orbis has a 75% rate of unique titles so there's very little duplication of titles.
   • The time between committee start-up and target implementation date was very short.

   These different issues made our process for building trust, understanding each others' current procedures, and making decisions a little more complex.

To make the best use of our time, we chose to do as much of the work as we could online. This process carries inherent pitfalls as well as time-saving efficiency. Online readers have few clues to facial expressions and voice tones: it is hard to tell when a person feels strongly about an issue, has taken offense at a comment, or is joking.

To ensure that each institution's needs and votes were equally represented, and to build trust among the institutions, we created a process for consensus building that was fairly involved and lengthy, but which worked well.

1. 1st meeting: July 96. Tried to understand the basic product which we were implementing. Asked ourselves lots of "what if?" questions (which were very useful questions to have at the site visit, and which led to some of the items on the To Do List). Generally just got to know each other a bit.

2. Read vendor and other consortium site documentation, and came up with more "How does this work?" and "What if?" questions.

3. Understand current local practice at each site Asked each site to present their basic lending policies so we each could have a general understanding of what each site gives to their patrons... needed to know how close or far apart we were in terms of loan periods, fines, charging for lost books, etc.

   
   
   

   
   

   Local Loan Periods and Fines

4. Site Visit: (September, 1996) Visit to Ohio: in mid September (10th - 12th) John Helmer, Nancy Nathanson, Jim Kopp, and I visited OhioLINK, Ohio State University, and the Ohio State Library. We viewed their procedures, asked questions, and got some handouts. We learned that there are substantial differences between OhioLINK and Orbis (centrally funded, many more institutions so greater chance of duplicate title at a closer library, OhioLINK has several large universities, OhioLINK's circulation policies seemed to have been less consensus-built, they don't restrict access to OhioLINK to fac/staff/students: everybody in the state can borrow, since it's state funded, OhioLINK paid for some of the libraries' to retrocon, and bought some libraries self-service checkout machines to offset staffing costs of implementing OhioLINK, etc. ).

5. Define issues: Began defining the issues we need to address: created a Master ToDo List, organized like-items: (item things, patron things, etc.) and then by order of priority.

   
   

   Master To Do List

6. Explore each issue from the Master ToDo List
   • Initiate Discussion: Issue is brought to the group via e-mail or web page, and entire group (all members of the listserv) engage in discussion about the issue.

   • Each site weighs in on issue: Rep's responsibility is to find out his/her institution's feelings about the issue and respond to the query.

   
   

   Query

7. Proposal submitted to Group: The majority opinion from the query is re-worded into a proposal. If it is necessary, some background information is also included.

   
   

   Proposal

8. Vote. Each site rep votes on the propsal, and indicates the strength of feeling that their site has about their vote. If they have strong feelings, or conflicting feelings at one site, they submit written comments.

   
   

   Vote

9. Recommendation submitted to the Council: Council discusses and votes. Final policy is created.

   
   

   Final Policy

10. Personal observations:
    • As Chair of the Committee, would I structure the process the same way? I think I would.

    • I think it was important for us to get a feeling of the issues and local procedures that each institution uses; it gave us a sense of the corporate culture of the different institutions, and let us understand the stances that some of us took when discussing proposals.

    • I think the formal and structured method of discussing recommendations let each institution have equal say.

    • I think that the web site which we created also leveled the playing ground: everybody had a chance to see what everybody else thought, how they voted, and what their concerns were. It brought out the needs and agendas of each institution.

    • The fact that the Committee was not the final authority was wonderful! If a certain recommendation did not have full support of every institution, we could kick it up to the Council. The web site allowed the background information about each institution's needs to be reviewed by all the Council members.

    • It was interesting to see some of the same fears shared by the institutions: the smaller institutions had concerns that their smaller collections may be wiped out by the larger institutions, due the greater number of students and faculty who can make requests. The larger institution has concerns that their larger collection will be wiped out due to its size and the fact that Orbis has 75% unique titles. Since we're not up and running yet, we aren't able to tell exactly what will happen, but knowing some of the underlying fears helped us understand that each of us has concerns about this new service.

    • Because of the large distances among us, it takes a great deal of effort and money to meet in person. We wanted to do as much work via e-mail as possible, but we didn't want to lose the value of in-person meetings. I was particularly impressed with how well the virtual meetings went; how much information was gathered and shared, and how much of the preliminary work could be done electronically. In order for this kind of virtual meeting to work, it takes committment on the part of each institution to read the memos, talk with other library staff, and respond electronically in a timely manner. There were days when I think we didn't do anything other than send and reply to email; flurries and snowstorms' worth of e-mail. There were a few times when we needed to call each other and ask for a reply, but that didn't happen often.

    • Working on this committee was some of the most fun I've had in my 22 years at the UO. The give and take of the committee members was impressive; and I really have a great deal of respect for the product that these people created. I think a lot of the success of Orbis borrowing is due to the policies and procedures that this group created and recommended. I also think that Orbis borrowing is so successful because of the amount of buy-in from each institution: we tend to give greater support to the products we help create.

    • I think the people who got in on the initial implementation phase had the most fun. The policies and procedures are pretty much set, now, and because we had such a variety of opinions and insights when they were created, they probably are going to be useful for quite a while in the future, even as other sites join in. I hope that the methodolgy we created for requesting input and giving a sense of the strength of feeling for that input, or one similar to it, will be used to discuss changes in policies in the future, since it allowed opportunity for sites not only to give their opinion, but also to weight their opinion and explain it.