Hello everyone and thanks for joining for today's session Marketplace Connections Advocate for Your Digital Collection with Data and Insights, we're so glad to be here with all of you today and before we begin we would like to take a moment to introduce ourselves, so while we're saying hello, feel free to say hi to us in the chat and let us know where you're joining from
We have two special OverDrive experts on the line today who are going to help us dive into Marketplace reporting data and insights, I'd like to take a moment to have them introduce themselves, so Barbie let's start with you, hello everybody I'm Barbie Estrada, I have been working both in and with schools for over a decade in support of literacy initiatives and here at OverDrive I've work with schools across ten states to ensure their success with Sora
And I currently support schools in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina
Thanks so much,so happy to have you with us today and Nikka
Hey my name is Nikka Hronis, I have been at OverDrive going on six years now and I work with schools in Washington, Oregon, Idaho
Montana, Alaska and Wyoming, so I love love of helping schools showcase the excellent work they are doing
With their digital colection and Sora, so I'm extra excited about today's session
Thank you so much nice excited to have you as well and I'm Gabby Cregen i'm an Instructional Designer on the Training Team here at OverDrive, I've been here for about two and a half years, I have background in middle school education and I'll be facilitating our session today
So now that we've heard from our speakers, let's talk a little bit about how we can get the most out of our time together, first we want to let you know there will be some opportunities for you to participate today and we look forward to hearing from you
Next we are offering closed captions via live transcription for today's webinar, so should you wish to adjust this, you can go ahead and click on the cc live transcript button in your zoom meeting controls, and a quick disclaimer it is possible that the captions may not be one hundred percent accurate as we present live, so we thank you for your patience and understanding
And in case you missed it in our earlier slides you can use the qa feature to submit questions to us directly during our webinar today, so we have got OverDrive experts Melissa, Sydney, Courtney, and Lisa all here to answer your questions, if you're not familiar with that qa button, it is also on the zoom toolbar
Finally we are recording today's session, so you'll receive a follow up email around this time tomorrow, that will contain information about how you can watch a recording and we've got some bonus resources for you as well
I see lot's coming into the chat, and just want to pause for a moment to say hello to everyone and thank you so much for your participation, we're really excited to hear from you today
Now here's a brief overview of what we will cover today at a high-level, we will discuss why we're all here today and I'll provide a quick introduction for those who are new to insights and automated carts in marketplace
Then we'll hear from our experts Barbie and Nikka as they walk us through popular reports and dashboards and we will wrap up with a summary
Best practices and resources for you to use after the session
So now why are we here
If you're joining us you may be wondering why might I want to run reports or really what's the purpose of looking at Marketplace data and insights and
In addition to shopping, curating, and other admin tasks that you might be familiar with, OverDrive Marketplace can provide answers to your questions
Curious to know, or have you ever wondered
Are my students using Sora
How many of them are using Sora and how does that usage compare over time
How long are my students reading
What are they reading and what's popular
Or do I have enough copies to support my student body
Data and insights and Marketplace can also help you if you've ever found yourself in one of these situations
Maybe you've been asked about the impact or importance of digital reading in Sora by a stakeholder or admin
Perhaps you love Sora yourself but you're not sure how it's being used in your school community
Maybe you're looking for evidence or support to advocate for budget acquisition or retention
Or you want to connect what you're doing behind the scenes and Marketplace with what students are doing in Sora
Or just finally you're looking to enrich the Sora experience at your school and you want information to help you do that
If any of these applied to you you're in the right place, and if you're just getting started with your digital collection, so maybe you haven't had the chance to ask yourself any of these questions yet, that's totally okay and we hope to give you an idea of what's possible and what data is available as your school continues on it's Sora journey
So before we get started, we're curious to know have you used reporting tools in Marketplace, so I'm gonna go head and launch this poll and would love to hear your feedback, obviously there's no right or wrong answers, a yes you have used reportingm no you haven't, or maybe you're wondering where's reporting
So let this go for just a few moments
Appreciate your participation and feedback, it's helpful for us to know who is with us here on the line today
And I love these responses that are coming, and we've got a good mix of good group here, so I'm going to close this down in just a moment
Three two
And one and I'm gonna end it and then I'll share just, so you can see that we've got a great mixed group today, so
We have some who have used reporting, we have some who have not and some who are brand new and may be wondering where's reporting in Marketplace, and the great news is I'm about to cover that in just one moment, so I'm gonna stop sharing my screen out
Or stop sharing the poll rather
And were on a pause now for a quick introduction to insights and automation, so we are going to answer that question where can you find these tools and which permissions are required
So on the insights tab in Marketplace, you can see that insights tab here on the blue bar you can view summary information for your library or schools digital collection, you can understand trends and run detailed reports
For more detailed information about your collection, you can select one of these reports here on the left hand side of the tab
And in todays session, we will be focusing specifically on Sora activity trends shown here along the top of the screen, and two of the popular reports that you can run
Now keep in mind, that these Sora activity or reports, user permissions are required to view dashboards and run reports in Marketplace
We will also be taking a look today at an automated carts, specifically the holds manager, so individuals who have this permission can access automated carts under the shop drop down in OverDrive Marketplace, so if you've ever done purchasing before, you'll likely be familiar with that shop drop down
And you can see automated carts there
So now for the moment we've finally been waiting for, let's hear from the experts, so before I hand it over to Barbie, I want to try to set the tone a little bit for this section
Keep in mind this webinar is just the beginning, so we want you to walk away today with an idea of what's possible
Which reports and dashboards are available and how they can be used
And which questions you can answer
Now Barbie and Nikka will point out some of the most important insightful and neat features of these reports
This is really just a jumping off point
After today's session, we will provide you with plenty of how-to resources that you can use to really dig into reports on your own, and start meaningful conversations about data
Thanks Gabby, so my personal goto report in Marketplace is the Sora activity report, with my experience working with schools, this is the quickest and easiest way to get a pulse on what your Sora usage looks like, so to run this report, you will need the Sora activity permission, so if you don't see that on your insights tab, reach out to your account manager or your school's main Sora administrator to get that enabled, the value in this report really lies in it's ability to answer some key questions, so these are the things that we are thinking about the most when we want to know is my school having success with students reading in Sora, so when you're thinking about how many of my students are engaging with my digital library and how much time are they spending reading, this is the report for you, you can also take it a step further to see what impact your outreach efforts are having
And you can run this report across multiple months to see how your usage is trending over time, that's a really important one, especially for this time of the school year when we're reflecting on how things went all year with Sora and then also how we can improve or get the most out of this resource in the year ahead
So on the screen here you can see a sample of what this report looks like, it is a very visual report, which means that you can make sense of that data quickly, so when you see spikes and valleys in these charts, what impacted that, this report really focuses on three areas, reading data, which helps you see how many books have been opened and how much total time your student body has spent reading, user activity, which shows you how many minutes per day your students are spending reading in the platform and how many students are engaging
And Sora is really smart, Sora will track active reading time, not just opening the app and looking at all of those beautiful book covers
This report also shows you achievements earned, and trending titles, so you can see the top ten books your students are reading the most by check outs and then by time spent reading
This report is also easily filterable and sharable, so there is no need to download excel documents to turn the data into charts and then put it in some user friendly format to share, in fewer than sixty seconds you could open this report
Filter it to the schools and date range you care about in that particular instance, to see the data points, save that PDF and then print it before your team meeting or email it to share it with your colleagues or administrators, it is just that quick and easy
Now I always recommend that you set aside a few minutes each month, maybe ten minutes max, to use this report to check the pulse of your digital library, and you can do that by filtering the report for the last thirty days, which is also the default time frame that will automatically populate
You can then filter it further by branch to see usage at your school or schools, if you're the district library coordinator you'll likely care about usage across every school, but if you're the school librarian at one building, you can see usage among just your students, or maybe you are in between, say you're the lead librarian across multiple middle schools, you can use just view those various locations in this report
And from here, I want to call your attention to some really important data points, first we know that students become better readers when they read for a certain number of minutes every day, this is proven, with the Sora activity report you can track that, you can see here this school has students reading for an average of fifty two minutes per day in Sora, wow that is a number that they can be really proud of
And once you know that you can figure out how many students are contributing to that average, and how many are reading with some consistency, these are your unique users, students who have taken an action on a book, then you can also take a look at how many students earned the blast off achievement, these are students brand new to Sora, who have logged in for the very first time and this metric shows you if you're reaching new students
You can also take this report a step further and filter it across the full school year to see how engaged your entire student body is
And be sure to look to see how this line here is trending, is usage consistent month to month, are there peaks and valleys and then think about why might this be
You can also measure the success of your outreach efforts, if you did a big Sora promotion during some time period, run this report across that time frame and see what the data shows, maybe you plan a Sora demo in May to get ready for summer reading, you can use this report to see if those promotions work and resulted in new students engaging with Sora for the first time with students opening more books and ultimately spending more time reading
And lastly the Sora activity report is great to see how your usage is trending month to month
Because this report is so visual, it makes it really easy to interpret these trends quickly
Back to you Gabby
Thank you so much Barbie, sorry about that, it took me a minute to find my mouse there, so just to recap really briefly, Sora activity is a quick and easy way to get a pulse on your students Sora usage, it can help you to identify how many students are using Sora, how much time they spend reading and more, as Barbie just showed and with that I'm gonna go ahead and hand it over to Nikka to walk us through trends
Wonderful, thank you Barbie and Gabby, so like the more activity reports
The trends report is great because it gives us the at a glance look at our collection, and how it changed over time, so it is one of my favorite reports to look at actually, because it really tells the story of your digital library, what's been happening
From last year to this year, and so on, so this is going to help you answer questions like, has our usage grown, has it dropped, how are we comparing this year to when we first started, really telling that entire story, so anybody with reports permissions in Marketplace can find the trends page within the insights tab and under the subtab of trends
First, I'll note a couple of best practices and then we can look at the specific trends report, so like the Sora activity report, this trends page can be saved as a pdf, so it's very easy to save, it's very easy to share out if you need to take this data and send it to somebody else or just keep it for your files
Next it's very important to note this piece and that is that
You can adjust the starting month for these reports, so as a best practice, you should always adjust this to coincide with the start of your particular school year, this way each bar will represent one full school year, and it will make it a lot easier to compare year to year
So these reports on the trends page or really my go to, if ever I am looking to help you brag on how well your library is doing, show how much growth you had in the past year or two, or if you're looking to advocate or for additional budget or to retain your current budget so we'll take a look at some of the specific reports on this page and i think you'll get a good visual of why that is
So first we see the checkouts report and this is typically going to be the best way for you to gauge the success of your collection over time, so ideally we're gonna see usage increasing from year to year, so as you're growing your collection in your communities, becoming more and more familiar, more comfortable with Sora and we want to see those numbers rising year over year, and that growth seeing that growth in these checkouts reports is going to tell us that your students are interested in the books you're providing and that they keep coming back for more
Next there is the unique users reports, and this is a little bit different, so while the checkouts report is tracking how many titles are checked out from your library, the unique users report tracks how many individual users are borrowing books in a given time period, now admittedly the unique users can be a tougher number to grow, it's not always going to jump, while your checkout report is
Hey check out numbers are growing and that's ok, but in a perfect world we'd like to see this number going up each year, again as you're introducing Sora to more students, getting more teachers involved, spreading the word to your families and getting, really expanding Soras reach, so when we see growth in the unique users report, that's telling us that Sora is reaching more students, our promotional efforts are really kind of expanding and reaching a larger audience
Next up is our holds data, now it's absolutely normal to see the holds increasing with your checkouts, and you might hope in here and you might see that, and might hear that if we're talking about it, and you might say, man you know holds are growing, that means students are waiting on books that's not good, now that's true students are waiting on books but that also means that your students are willing to wait to read the great books in your library, which is a good thing, holds data, that's on this report, is giving us a direct insight into how much demand there is for titles in your library and that's an important thing to be able to capture so
If you hop into the trends page, and you notice, you know, your holds have had a big spike, along with your checkouts, this is going to tell you a few things, if you take away, so one of course is that the demand in your library is high
That's great
But being as big, seeing that big spike is also, can be an indicator that you have what I call a holds situation on your hands, on that you need to make a plan to address that, make sure that things are moving, um smoothly, so
In my eyes, filling holds as the most, one of the most surefire ways to keep, kind of fanning the flame of your digital collection so to speak, if students have to wait
Too long for books, they are going to lose interest, um you run that risk, your students understand that they may have to wait for popular books, but there's two, there is such thing as too much of a wait, so that's what this report can help you identify so
If you notice that jump in your holds, and your holds are, you know, way up from last year, when you're looking at this report, which is this case, really here in this, in this screenshot for this school, that's a cue to take a look at your holds report, which we're going to talk about a little later and have a chat with your Account Manager or Content Specialists to make a game plan for how to address these holds, get them under control so that your collection is still moving smoothly
Having that meeting with your team, that'll just help, they can help you find creative solutions, you can use different lending models to fill those holds, or you might end up deciding that, you know, what we need to use these reports, use this data to advocate for additional budget because the demand is simply so high, it's kind of a undeniable fact when you're looking at that data to say students are needing books and we are needing additional money to provide the books that they're wanting
So next there is this wonderful report for activity and purchases, and this is one of my favorite reports to look at and check in on, because this kind of shows the mentality that if you build it they will come to your library, so this report, as you can see here, it shows us the collection activity, which is in the different blues, as it relates to your library purchases, which are in green, so when I'm looking at this report, is for the blue activity to spike whenever I see the green purchasing line spike, so this report is a good, the screenshot is a good reflection of that, it's doing just that
This report, when I do see, when I see that
In a correlation, thats telling me, that when I'm buying books, students are borrowing them, there's a direct relationship between the two and the timing is almost exact in many cases, so if you don't, if your collection is highly engaged, you should and you hop into this report, you should be seeing a direct relationship, direct correlation as in the screenshot, if you don't see that correlation in your data, that's a sign that you need to either, maybe amp up your promotion after your purchasing titles, find a new way to spread the word about that or be looking at your purchasing, maybe you need to be more strategic, maybe your timing, as you can rearrange when you're purchasing, how often you're purchasing things like that, so
When this, look, data is looking good on your trends page, is always one I recommend sharing with the folks above you, because they like to see that the funds you are being given are being put to good use, students are borrowing those books and this perfectly will show that, tell that story
Then one more report on the trends page is the unique users, this is, again pretty much shows you the same information as above, just in a different display
Thank you so much Nikka, really cool to see that trends page, and some of the additional data that it provides, as Nikka showed, that it gives you that at a glance information about how your collection's activity has changed over time, and you can actually change that start month to align with your schools, the school year beginning, which is really, really helpful so
Next up, I'm gonna pass it back over to Nikka, who's going to introduce us to the checkouts report
So while the Sora activity report and the trends report gave us a great overview of our activity, how students are using the library, again at a glance, the checkouts report is where we can really drill down and get more granular data relating to our checkouts, so this is where we can view our checkout information organized by school, by month, by title, by subject, there are so many options, so anybody with the reports permission can really drill into this, have all of, um that data available
And since this is a pretty robust report and there's so much we can do with it, we are actually going to hop into Marketplace on a little field trip and take a look at it together in real time
So I will very smoothly I'm sure
In Marketplace
All right
So
Again this report lives under the insights tab with all of your other reporting tools, it's going to just be under the checkout link
And then I'm going to hop directly into this box, showing me all of my different reporting options
The first thing I always like to adjust and manipulate for this report and point out, is the checkouts by field, this is what controls how we are organizing the checkouts in the report, so do I want to view checkouts by title checkouts, by subject, checkouts by month, branch, those are, in my opinion, the most frequently used options for this report and I'm gonna start with a month then point out a few things here
Now typically when you're running this report if you're looking for all time usage, you can leave all of these fields pretty blank, and or pretty, you know, open and non limiting, unless you know, I'm only looking for audio book checkouts or only looking for checkouts on titles in spanish etc
The other important thing to note is the date ranges available, so depending on the type of information you're looking for, you might only want to view data for this school year, so you can adjust the dates accordingly, if you leave these two fields blank, that's going to give you data from day one of your time with OverDrive to the present, so sometimes when you're just looking for a really comprehensive view of your checkout information, that's what you'll want to do, so to start, I'm going to leave this just at checkouts by month and leave everything else blank and see what we get
Loading, loading
Now I'm just in our demo site right now, so we won't be seeing any actual school information but I'm going to walk through this just as I would if this was a live school
So the first thing to point out, is that when I'm running the checkouts by month
Report it's always going to start by organizing the checkouts with the highest number of checkouts first, I actually like this so that I can check in and see if this is um, maybe this school year, that's ideal to me, that I always want us to be doing the best we can at present, so any time I notice that, you know, last month or two months ago we've had our highest number of checkouts yet
I always like to point that out, that's a great sign that something's been going well
Then I like to organize this by month, so I just click on a header
Here and that will reorganize the months chronologically
And again, all of these reports in my eyes
I'm always just looking to see what story these reports are telling me about my library, and with the checkout report, since there's so much data available, sometimes we have to read between the lines a little bit, and this is where sometimes it will be very helpful to have that meeting with your Account Tean to look at this together, because they can help you ask those questions and kind of really help you interpret the data, and the impact, and what this is all telling us so
I look for off the bat, recently have we had any months that have exceptionally high check out, so March was kind of the highest I've seen, I might ask you if there was anything special going on in March, were you promoting more, were you using Sora in the classroom, did you have teacher orientation, anything like that, that might have caused a spike and something that we can hopefully harness and recreate in the future, make sure we do those things again to get those great high checkouts
I'll also look for any lower months, maybe this was, I'm in
A december, so it was around a winter break, that makes sense
One other thing I like to really suggest when looking at the checkouts report by month, is that you take a peek at your summer months, since this is when our students obviously aren't typically in school, it's a good gauge of seeing, comparing this summer versus last summer, ideally again your checkouts are growing, that's always a good gage of seeing what's happening in the collection when we aren't in front of our students, to be reminding them sharing new things, how much usage is happening over the summer
So month to month is helpful, just tell that kind of story over the full school year
Another thing that I like to run is or the checkouts organized by branch, this is especially useful if you are a district librarian or somebody managing a district collection, and it's your job to check in and make sure that, you know, everybody kind of has what they need and they're using Sora as best, as well, as you want them to so if I adjust this
To branch
I can, actually wanted
Organize by checkouts
I'm looking to see which schools and I should, I should mention branch when, when we say this in Marketplace, is basically just the term for school site, so if you run this for your district, you should see each of your schools
Lined up here and the number of checkouts that they've had to the site, so this is going to tell me my top schools
I want to take a look and see, in my surprise by any of these numbers, are these my super rock stars, I know they're Sora champions, they are always promoting Sora with their students, maybe there is no surprise, that's great
Maybe there's an opportunity for those top three schools to share some of their best practices, or things that are really working for them, I think that can always be really impactful for the schools that are maybe at the lower end of the spectrum here, or are maybe struggling to promote Sora and get lots of buy-in and engagement, to hear what's working, so they can hopefully adopt that for their schools as well
On the other hand, I'm looking at the bottom of the list to see, hmm am I surprised that any of these schools that aren't circulating so well, are down here, what can I do to support them, do I need to send them some resources, do we need extra training, so kind of trying to bridge that gap and see
What this data is telling me, what I might be able to take away as an action item, in terms of again promotion, training, all of that
The other thing I wanted to point out about this report, if you are not managing a district collection, maybe you're just hopping in here for your school, you don't really need to know how the other schools are doing, you really just want to see your data, you can adjust this branch field here to find just your individual school
This is how you can separate your usage out by
Sep, separate the other data out and view just your school's information
So it's gonna show me just my branch
I can also change this, if I want to maybe show titles by subject for just my branch, for example
Just to show you what that looks like, so again, so much you can find here, I do recommend running through this with your Account Team, they can really help you get lots of takeaways here, and then the last thing I was going to point out on the checkouts report, is that if you click into any of these links, either of these links, it's going to take you out to a full check out detail page for that time period for that subject, for that branch, etc so this is where you really get into the details of the dates the books were borrowed, which books were borrowed, which branch were the users from, who borrowed that book, so really into the nitty gritty here, this is kind of the best way to look under the hood of your collection
See what's happening, I kind of get a good, good feeling for your usage data
Now kick it back over to Gabby
Thank you Nikka, I loved being able to see that report live, that was really helpful to just kind of see you going through it, and running those reports, so in summary the checkouts report helps you to view information about your checkouts for the time period that you specify, as Nikka showed, you can also add additional criteria to further organize this data, so things like adding in separating it by month or comparing checkouts between schools, using that branch as she showed
Next up, I am going to just keep this brief, because I want to keep us going into the great content that Nikka and Barbie have for us, so we are going to head into the current hold report
Wonderful back over to me
So the holds report is great but we saw, of course, we ran through the trends page, seeing just holds at a glance, how that compares over time, but like how we saw more granular data and the check outs report
Holds report under the insights tab shows us even more specifics
So this report, again you are going to need the report's permission to find this information, this report is where we can go to find the average wait time in my collection, this is where I can find if there are books with too many holds, the holds are too high and I need more copies, I can find of there books, holds on books that have expired holds that need to be deleted, so it really getting into the nitty gritty
On this side you can see the options you have when you run the holds report, the parameters you see on the screen are really what you'll want to use in your report, in most cases however, you can make adjustments if you do want to view titles that maybe have been weeded, titles that aren't available for sale etc, you can also filter this by branch which is important to note
Just like how we could in the checkouts report, if you only want to see your users holds, that's where you can adjust that
And the big thing to notice here at the very bottom, is that if you are in an advantage account and you've purchased titles, you do have the option to click this box at the bottom of the screen to view holds on just your advantage titles, so maybe you don't want to see the shared or district collection titles, that is an option
Are
So here we have a great screenshot of a real holds report, now first I want to point out at the very top here, you can see the average weight period for your collection, and this shows you how long your students are waiting in line for the books that they have placed on hold
Checking this number is a great way to see if you have again a holds situation that needs to be addressed, is this glaringly high in relation to your lending period settings, right
Next, down below, I like to look at the all holds column first personally, so I click the header to reorganize the data in descending order, so I could view my highest holds first, I can check to see if there are any sky high numbers here that are really jump out at me, what are we working with, this helps me see that
Very first off the bat
Another important column to point out is the consortium ratio, and that you can see the abbreviation for cons and one of our most asked questions what does that stand, for the consortium on the cons stands for consortium, which is going to be your district or shared collection
As this com is showing you the ratio for that particular title, and the ratios comparing the number of students
Waiting per copy you own, so Barbies gonna talk a little bit more about the hold ratio and how we can work with that, but I just wanted to point this out since this is another great way to identify holds that need attention by sorting on that column in particular
Next I'll point out the consortium own column, now this number tells you how many copies of the title you already own, so maybe you have a title here that has a high number of holds and only one copy in your collection, that tells me you need to order additional copies of that book, now maybe that is a Diary of a Whimpy Kid and you already own fifteen copies and you refuse to buy even one more, we understand, that's a great thing to talk to your Account Team about, maybe you can add the book in another lending model that will help fill holds while the book is in super high demand, so creative solutions like that or something, we can help you figure out, so don't be shy to ask for help with that
Or another situation you might find is that you look at this consortium owned column and you notice that there is a zero, so another best practice would be to filter this column in
Descending order, so that you can see the lowest number of holds first and keep an eye out for any zeros, if you see that you there are holds on a book that has zero copies, that means that book has expired from your collection but there are students waiting for it so that's your queue to go in and either repurchase the title or weed it from your collection, so that students aren't waiting for books that aren't going to come
Lastly I recommend looking at this report, in particular, at least once a year so you can analyze the first active hold column, now as a best practice I like to delete any holds that were placed before this school year or whatever date you're comfortable with, otherwise these very old holds can clog everything up, so you can see on this there is one I believe it's around a twenty eighteen
That student probably doesn't even go to my school or maybe be in my district anymore, so it's a great your Account Team can take care of that for you, wiping that those holds out and making sure that you're starting fresh with your holds for the school year so
All of this is very important, filling and addressing your holds is one of the absolute most important parts of your collection maintenance, if it's not something you're familiar with on it's worth checking into
This is what's keeping your students interested, making sure again that your collection has really good flow, so I always recommend, again, take a look at these reports with your team get a good game plan and make sure you understand how to interpret this data, so you can really be
Supporting your students and making sure they are getting the books that they need
Thank you again Nikka, I loved that going through the reports kind of step-by-step and highlighting those important columns for us to pay attention to, as you could see that you can filter information about average weight time number of holds suspended holds and more and as Nikka pointed out, you can work with your Account Manager to kind of really interpret this data and make decisions about, maybe how many copies are needed, whether old holds need to be removed, things like that
I'm gonna turn it back over to Barbie now for our last section, we're gonna switch gears a bit and look at the automated holds manager
Thanks Gabby and so we have really good news for everybody, we have a great tool to help you automate your workload called the holds manager, this is an alert that you can set up that will run your holds report according to the parameters you choose, and it will put books with high holds into a cart for your review, so in Marketplace you will need your hold manager and purchasing permission to utilize this, and today we want to show you some best practices for how to set up and customize this tool to meet your needs and how to build this into your routine, so that you are responding to that student demand
Within the holds manager tool you can view your current plan, chances are that if you're getting automated emails that let you know your hold manager is ready, you already have a plan set up
You can edit or revise your plan as needed, you can also run the holds manager at a time that is convenient for you, so if you're in Marketplace working on collection development already, you can click that run now button to get the most up to date data possible
And of course you can create new plans and delete old plans at any time
If you find that you have a plan set up and it's just not quite working for your own personal work style, reach out to your Account Manager for some help, this tool is not necessarily one size fits all, it can be completely customized to meet your needs and we can help you to do that
Now when you're creating or revising a holds manager plan to help you automate things, and take some of that workload off your plate, there are some important ways that you can do this, first, you can customize it by user demand and budget, this is where your holds ratio comes into play, remember that holds ratio is the number of students waiting per copy in your library, you likely don't need to be alerted for every single book that is placed on hold, but you do want to know when you have quite a few students waiting, so that you can do what you can to minimize wait time and increased reading time, we recommend that you set up your hold manager carts for a ratio of three or more
So if you have three or more students waiting per copy, then those books will appear in this tool, of course your needs might be different so that ratio is adjustable to your liking
Under user demand and budget, I don't typically see schools customize much further on this page, because once you receive your holds manager cart, you'll be able to tweak it as much or as little as you like
Next you can customize to match your collection development policies, and I especially want to point out here that you can customize your tool to only show you holds from your branch or school site, this let's you know that you are reacting to holds placed by the students that you are serving every day
And lastly you can pick the schedule that works best for you, you can set this report to run daily, weekly, bimonthly, or monthly, quite a few schools that I work with, run it weekly or by monthly and then use it as a reminder or an alert system, so they might not respond every single time that their hold manager runs weekly but at least that lets them know, hey you have some books with high holds when you're in Marketplace next time or later this week be sure to take a look at this
And here is where you will set it to save a cart as well, so that you can put your personal touches on these books, I have heard from so many schools that their favorite part of their Sora library is being able to take student or staff requests and then tell those individuals within twenty four hours that that book they asked for is now available, this tool helps you respond to student demand in this way and build a library that you can confidently say, hey these are the books my students want to read
And once you have that plan set up you will get an automated alert in your inbox letting you know when you have books with high holds, so I'm going to go ahead and jump into Marketplace now and show you some pro tips for how to best manage these carts
So in Marketplace here
In your carts, your holds manager will be highlighted in blue, now if you have multiple holds manager carts, there is no need to worry, what you can do is you can either merge them all into one cart
Or you can work with the one with the most recent date to know that you are getting the most recent data and then just delete the other ones
Now when I'm in my cart, the first thing I want to do is remove the columns that I just don't need to reference right now, I've already purchased these titles once before so I can remove most of these general columns and all I have to do here is click, when they're blue they're gonna be visible, when they're white they're gonna be removed
I can also remove some of those date columns as well
And then with ownership, this is going to vary depending on my role
So if I'm a District Library Coordinator responsible for our shared collection
I'm going to keep those consortium fields visible, like you see on the screen here
But I would keep the advantage fields visible and then hide those consortium fields, if I were a Media Specialist at an individual school working in my advantage account
And you can see down here that this looks just so much better doesn't it
And the last thing that you can do here is drag and drop the columns that matter most to you, side by side, so this is one of my favorite Marketplace pro tips so
I have my title here, I wanna look at how many holds there are on that title, and then I want to make decisions on how many units I wanna buy based on those holds, remember that all the books in your holds manager cart are already gonna have high holds in them anyways, because we've set that of them up and then if I pull my price over here too, I'm going to be able to make decisions that also match my budget so when you're reviewing your carts in this manner it really helps, you know that you're making the best decisions for your school or your library
Back to you Gabby
Thank you so much Barbie, very very cool to see that in action, and I agree I just saw a comment coming in about moving the columns on being able to add it and change that view is really so helpful, and so thank you Barbie for walking us through that, so I know that we are a few minutes over and we appreciate you all staying on the line with us today, lots of great information from Nikka and Barbie, I know I learned a ton today and if you're still here with us, we'd love to hear from you, so we're gonna go ahead and open up the chat again
And we'd love to hear which reports you are excited to try out after today or what questions you're looking to answer, so I know we gave you a lot of information but we'd love to hear your feedback so if you do have a moment to go ahead and tell us in the chat we'd love to hear it
While you're doing that, I'm gonna leave you with just a couple of best practices, so our first is just a follow up on today session by checking your inbox tomorrow for your follow up information, you can go ahead and share it with colleagues or stakeholders if you'd like
Also Nikka and Barbies stressed throughout each of their sections today the importance of having conversations with your Account Manager, and that they're here as a resource for you, you know they're in these reports every day, they can help you with interpreting the data and this is part of your OverDrive service, you know you're not alone in facing these reports they're here to really talk with you and make sure your comfortable with with the data and with decision making based on it
And then finally explore and plan, so we encourage you to get into Marketplace, you know if we are going to start somewhere, maybe start with that Sora activity tab there and maybe try to run a report or two, we also encourage you to chat with your colleagues, so Barbie and Nikka both made a lot of good comments about collection development policies today, maybe you want to have a quick conversation and say you know, hey team what are some data points that were interested in, what are some questions we want answered and then you can always bring that back to your conversation with an Account Manager
I mentioned that we would leave you with some resources, today is really just a jumping off point and so I want to give you just a moment to see what some of those resources are before we end today
They are going to be top three resources for Marketplace Data and Insights, we have how to videos, we have detailed help articles that also have some scenario based information, and of course OverDrive Account Manager, so we have two of them here on the line and if you ever have questions about who your Account Manager is, you can let us know if you have Marketplace access, you can find their contact information on the support tab in Marketplace
As the follow up to today's session we've created this single sheet resource for you, it includes a summary of what we've covered today, as you saw all those kind of little checkpoints that I was doing as we go through, and so we're gonna go ahead and chat out a link to this and it will be in your follow up as well
Before we wrap up we always want to shout out that you can register for our upcoming webinars, remember that even if you can't attend the live, you'll receive a follow up email with a link to watch the recording
And finally on behalf of Barbie, Nikka, myself and team OverDrive, we're really grateful you chose to spend some time with us today, we hope that you found this to be beneficial, I know I learned a ton from both of our speakers, we're gonna go ahead and chat out two links now, one is gonna be to a post webinar evaluation, we really look at this feedback and it helps us to pick our topics for future sessions, and helps us to change how we plan our session, so we'd love to hear from you, we're also gonna chat out a certificate of attendance and will include both of these in your follow up tomorrow as well
One more quick reminder to keep an eye out for that follow up email remember that you can share that recording or resources with your colleagues as well
And with that, we want to thank you again for joining us, we're going to log off of the audio and visual part of the webinar, but we will stay logged into Q&A if you have any final questions
Thank so much everyone and thank you Barbie and Nikka