ORLO provides both Academics and departmental administrators with a comprehensive environment in which to create and manage structured reading lists, including digitised content, in order to distribute these as effectively as possible to students. Controlled workflows also ensure that the Libraries responsible for fulfilling these lists, who ensure adequate availability of the required resources via the most appropriate channels, have clear visibility and can review lists as they are published to ensure the best service to the students. The service is tightly integrated with both the Library Management System, ALEPH, and the University’s Resource Discovery service, SOLO, creating efficient transitions between services for academics, departmental staff, library staff and end users.

ORLO is also integrated with the University’s VLE environment Canvas, providing students with direct access to their reading lists, a vital part of their course content ORLO is currently moving from its pilot phase into a consolidation and expansion phase with a controlled number of courses across all departments and subject areas. Registration is controlled in order to ensure that the service retains a high level of quality and is both scaleable and sustainable. All members of the University with a Single Sign On (SSO) account can however access reading lists in ORLO to ‘view only’ but all other roles, such as creating or publishing lists, will on be assigned as part of the official registration process.