2019 Annual Meeting

The Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC) is comprised of nine research institutions in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area including: American University,  The Catholic University of America, Gallaudet University, George Mason University, The George Washington University, Georgetown University, Howard University, Marymount University and The University of the District of Columbia. In its efforts to create and coordinate opportunities for research and shared resources, the consortium shares an off-site storage facility and is deeply invested in consortium loan services. From a user perspective, consortium loans are the most popular service offered.

In the summer of 2018, the WRLC collectively migrated and integrated to the Ex Libris cloud-based library management system, Alma. The Access Services departments, across all partnering institutions, manage areas in Resource Sharing, Course Reserves, Circulation and Student Employee supervising. Alma integration directly informed all department functions.  Both pre and post migration, fellow Access Services colleagues met frequently to discuss challenges and solutions in creating Alma processes that would work for a consortium that shared material and patron services as intimately as the WRLC institutions had done so in the past. While previous months had included collective preparation efforts such as configuration planning, training and procedural drafting, many unexpected decisions had to be made retroactively. Please join us to discuss what we wish we knew, what we learned and how we adapted as our nine research institutions collectively moved from a home-grown consortium loan services program and into Alma.