The Five College Libraries of Western Massachusetts have a long-standing tradition of collaborating on technology projects which improve our communities’ access to information resources. After investigating various link resolver and federated search products in 2002, the Five College Librarians’ Council signed a three year contract with Ex Libris in spring 2003 to host SFX link resolver and MetaLib federated search installations. Following a very successful implementation of SFX in 2003, the Libraries took on the MetaLib implementation in 2004. From the perspective of one participating library, this article addresses how the Consortia planned, made decisions and took actions regarding this product. Some of the common interests discussed are interface design, usability, resource description, performance settings, product upgrades and customer support, as well as individual library concerns about purpose and presentation among other web-based tools, categorizing resources, affect on resource terms of use, and user support.