We're pleased to let you know that today we are 'soft-launching' our consortial Primo interface today, which we are initially calling "CatalogPlus," for the five libraries comprising the Michiana Academic Library Consortium (MALC). These include:

• Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame (Ex Libris Aleph)
• Kresge Law Library, University of Notre Dame (III Millennium)
• Cushwa-Leighton Library, Saint Mary's College (Ex Libris Aleph)
• Bowen Library, Bethel College (Ex Libris Aleph)
• McKenna Library, Holy Cross College (Ex Libris Aleph)

We have multiple views set up for each of the participating libraries:

• Notre Dame
• Notre Dame Law Library
• Saint Mary's College
• Holy Cross College
• Bethel College

CatalogPlus will also be available via the search box on the Hesburgh Libraries's website (http://www.library.nd.edu/) after noon Eastern time on April 2, 2009 and the other participating websites after that.

This milestone represents the completion of the first phase of Primo for us, providing a union catalog of about 3 million bibliographic records offering enhanced usability, search, and services for our community of users. Many people were involved in eight implementation workgroups throughout this phase of the project from all five libraries. The 'soft-launch' essentially means putting the new CatalogPlus service on our website without any formal public announcement to our users, and begin to collect usage patterns and feedback.

We will continue to make improvements both to functionality and the user interface as we receive comments and feedback, and perform additional usability and focus group sessions.

This fall, we will have a public marketing campaign to announce the service formally to our community of users, and will be tweaking the Primo configuration and adding content throughout the summer.

In the subsequent phases of the project, which begin now, we will be adding local digital content to CatalogPlus, including:

• Encoded Archival Description (EAD) files from Notre Dame's Special Collections and Rare Books library, the University Archives and Institute for Latino Studies;
• digital images from the Hesburgh Libraries' Art Image Library, Architecture Library and other image collections at Notre Dame;
• electronic theses and dissertations from the University of Notre Dame;

We plan to add other external content as well, including:

• bibliographic and holdings records from the Center for Research Libraries (CRL);
• bibliographic, authorities and holdings records from the Franklin D. Shurtz Library at Indiana University South Bend (IUSB);
• other abstracting & indexining (A&I) metadata from external sources, including vendors
• full-text from both freely-available repositories and vendors

Any questions you may have regarding the MALC CatalogPlus service can be directed to the two co-Project Managers of the project, Pascal Calarco and Mark Dehmlow .