The Orbis Council appointed the Orbis Borrowing Committee in late May, 1996, with a charge to recommend Orbis borrowing and lending implementation procedures and policies. Each of the 12 Orbis institutions was represented by one OBC member. Representatives from institutions with multiple libraries and branches sometimes presented multiple viewpoints on single issues.

The OBC met four times during the implementation phase:

• mid-July, 1996: (asked ourselves many questions about the circulation system, and had very few answers)
• mid-October, 96: (reviewed information brought back from visit to Ohio, and discussed issues)
• mid-November, 96: (discussion of issues)
• late-January, 96: (III training session)

The Orbis Consortium had challenging questions to work through as we resolved issues. Some of these issues are:

• 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. This presentation explains the procedures we used.

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