Staff at EDUCAUSE, the national nonprofit organization dedicated to the use of information technology to advance higher education, interviewed St. Olaf’s Roberta Lembke, Chief Information Officer, and Sarah Johnston, Head of Library Technology and Web Services, about the implementation of the new “Alma” library management system at St. Olaf and Carleton.
Enterprise system implementations can be a complex proposition, coordinating needs, cultures, and project activities between IT and various institutional areas. But what happens when you add another institution to the project? That’s the case with St. Olaf College and Carleton College libraries. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded them a grant in 2003 to merge the colleges’ library catalogs and library management systems, also known as the Bridge Consortium.
EDUCAUSE generously made available a downloadable version of the interview, which appeared in the “Enterprise Application Market in Higher Education” report of the EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR).