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The eXtensible Catalog (XC) project began at the University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries with a desire to offer new tools to library users that would fit well into their established work processes and help them find the best possible resources. The plan was to gather information about the work practices of students and faculty members and use that knowledge to create an opensource, next-generation search interface. The Rochester team had already established a record of conducting user studies, most notably for their digital repository. 1 It was a logical next step to study scholarly practices and apply a participatory design process to the development of a new catalog interface. It took several tries to get the project off the ground, but once The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided guidance and support, the Rochester team rallied its partners and the work began. Cornell University made an early commitment to user research and was soon followed by Ohio State University. In both cases, members of the site teams were driven by an interest in the technology but even more by a desire to learn the research-based, participatory design approach. The partnership with Yale University grew v