Hello and welcome to today's webinar, Save Time (and Sanity) with Your Digital Content Librarian
This thirty minute session is designed for public library staff in the United States and Canada
We are going to go ahead and get started and in this session you can expect to learn who are the Digital Content Librarians
What your Digital Content Librarian can do to help you and your library
We'll cover some resources and best practices and will leave you with some next steps to put these items into good use
To kick us off a very quick introduction of all of our wonderful speakers today. My name is Emma Dwyer and I am a product trainer here on OverDrive training team I will be facilitating this session today. And I normally work with library partners to train them on Marketplace and Libby and I'm also one of the cohosts of the Professional Book Nerds podcast
Joining me today we have Cindy Orr, Digital Collection Advisor, she received her MLS from Case Western Reserve University has written two books on the topics of readers advisory service
And was the 2004 recipient of the Margaret E. Monroe Award from the American Library Association
For OverDrive she works primarily to identify the hottest forthcoming books and consult on the best strategies for successful customer title selection
Shelia Mawdsley our Digital Content Librarian and she has a BA from Marietta College in English and Music and her MLS from Kent State University
Before coming to OverDrive in 2021 she worked in public libraries for seventeen years doing reference, technology training, adult programming, and digital collections
Megan Volchko rounds out our speakers she graduate with an MLIS from Kent State University, then worked in academic libraries before coming to OverDrive in 2014. She's had the pleasure of working with libraries in over half of the fifty states from Florida to Alaska
We also have the entire north america Digital Content Librarian team on our chat today. So if used to say, excuse me, what state or provinces you're from in the United States or Canada your specific DCL will say hello to you if you. If are from other countries you do have a Digital Content Librarian counterpart and you can find them in Marketplace under the support tab.
Or DCLs are on the line to answer any questions you have so you can certainly pop those questions in the zoom q and a box or just say hello in chat. With that I'm going to hand things over to Meghan to get us started.
Hi Meghan I'm gonna ask you to unmute
Thank you so much great way to get this started. So thank you Emma for that lovely introduction and for letting me know I was talking to myself. But we were so excited to be here to talk to you about the Digital Content Librarian team. Before we get into what we can do for your library let's break down a bit about who we are and why you can trust our team to help your library. Every library in addition to an account manager and product support specialist has a Digital Content Librarian who is here to help you with all things collection development
So who exactly is this team of librarians that OverDrive has working for them
We all have a masters degree
Everyone on our team has a masters degree in library and information science from accredited schools all over the country. In addition we've all worked in libraries. Cumulatively, we have decades of experience in both public and academic libraries as a team. From large systems to smaller branch libraries we understand the needs of different types of libraries and issues you might be facing may be similar to ones that we've experienced in the past in our own time in libraries
We've done more selection than most. The majority of us come from libraries where we've done selection and collection development prior to starting to work at OverDrive
We are dedicated collection development librarians who want you to succeed in reaching your patrons and your library's goals
We work with many libraries and thus get to see what works and what doesn't
We've also been around for a while. Our DCL team as many members have been with OverDrive for more than five years so we've seen a lot. We've worked with all kinds of libraries big and small to achieve their goals and we want to help all of you to do the same
We're focused on collection development and helping you. That's it. We're collection development librarians, of course we spend our "free time" learning about upcoming releases, making lists of fun curated collections, taking suggestions now for pics for your “Tortured Poets Department Read-Alikes", but what we're really here to do is to help you. Our jobs are to make sure that your jobs are a little bit easier
We love what we do and we know how lucky we are
There is no question in our minds that we are doing amazing things and we are all so lucky to be working for OverDrive and getting to work with all of the amazing librarians that we do. We have a great team of librarians internally that we get to interact with on a daily basis and we get to work with some of the best librarians around the US and Canada making sure that their goals are met and hopefully exceeded
There's no else we'd rather be
Hi I'm Cindy
You have to excuse me I have a cold today
OverDrive's associated with libraries had an interesting beginning and we thought you might like to hear more about that
I joined OverDrive after a retired from working libraries
But I've been associated with a lot longer than that. That associated began when I was the collection manager at Cleveland Public Library over twenty years ago
And OverDrive began working with libraries
So let me take you back to the year 2002
George W Busy was president
9/11 had just happened a few months before
It was a hugely different time in technology then
That was no were less connection available yet for the internet
Only 20 percent of internet users in the US even had high speed connections at home
Eighty percent had dial up connections
You may be too young to remember dial up connections. But that was when you had to connect a modum directly from your computer to your telephone landline with a cord, dial a number and connect
But that meant you were tying up the land line for your family
There were fights over who got to use the modum because only one person could use it at a time
At CPL we were looking for a way to deliver ebooks to our patrons
We wanted three things
One, we wanted to be able to deliver books directly to our patrons to use on their own devices
We wanted them to be able to walk away from that connected modum after they downloaded and then read the book offline
And three we wanted to offer
Sought after in best selling titles the popular books of patrons really wanted to read
At the time there was only one ebook vendor for libraries it was called Net Library
It failed to meet our criteria
You could use it on a computer
Remember there were no tablets yet
Or iPhones
You had to be on a live connection
All of the content they had with some academic publishers not popular books from trade publishers
We went for help to several of our venders and anyone else we can think of. But no one could deliver what we wanted
Publishers were very worried that their content would be pirated so they register
Napster, a company that shared free copy righted music files that they had stolen
Had been shut down just the year before and publishers were afraid the same thing that happened to the music industry would happen to their books. They would be pirated, stolen, napsterized
Then in June of 2002 I went to the America Library Associated conference in Atlanta
I was walking through the exhibit hall and paste the Adobe booth
There is a man in a shirt that said OverDrive
It was Steve Potash, the founders and CEO of OverDrive who is still our leader today
Now I recognize the name OverDrive because I just read an article in Crains Cleveland Business about
The company was helping Barnes and Noble deliver ebooks to their customers
So I introduced myself to Steve and told them when needed to talk
I brought a couple of other CPL people to meet him and after we got back home to Cleveland we met and the rest is history
I have to give a lot of credit to both companies. We sat down together and talk through what we wanted
And OverDrive made it happen
We went live in 2003
Something to remember that this was four years before the Kindle was released so library patrons were able to read digital books years before Amazon customers got access to ebooks
We needed start up fun so we went to the director of CPL, Andrew Venable
He provided a significant amount of money from his director fund to get us started
Remember this was for creating out of sin are something that hadn't existed in the world before
And incredibly Mr. Venable trusted us to make this work
He didn't even use computers himself so his trust was amazing and visionary
And Sari Feldman who was his assistant director of the time was one of the major forces behind our project
And so was Tracy Strobel who is in our IT department and is now the director at Cuyahoga County public library
We met with the OverDrive people and empathize that we wanted to build something that all libraries could use
So that was the beginning
We went live in 2003
And kept meeting with OverDrive team for years
OverDrive is not a typical company it's a place where you could do good as well as make a living
We have a B Corp certificate
Which is a designation than a businesses can earn
That assures that it is committed to all the stakeholders not just a profits for its share holders
And all of us on the collection development team come with a background in public libraries
So we don't have the typical commitment to sales at all costs. We truly want to help you find the best titles for your library and will tell you the truth
There are many stories that you may hear about what a difference librarians collective make with our digital collections. For blind people, for shut-ins, for people who live in remote places
Wouldn't be able to get books without Libby
Not to mention commuters or people who are working out or those who just like it convenient
We changing lives all over the world and it's a great feeling to be part of it
We did that. You should all be very proud
One huge early issue was that has mentioned before publishers were reluctant to let us sell their books
It took a many years for Steve to convince each publishers one by one to allow us to sell the licenses their books
Steve singlehandedly led this effort
As each publisher came a board they were surprised by how much income they made through OverDrive
They had largely ignored how much money libraries were spending on their books
This was odd
Since libraries largely bought through the same venders that book stores used
But they had never really noticed
No one out the library sector was important and they didn't even track that data
Over the decades this attitude has improved some until now it's a given
Publishers will sell through OverDrive in the US
The same battle of signing publishers is continuing right now in our overseas markets as team OverDrive works one by one all over the world to sign up new publishers who have never done this kind of thing before
At the very beginning some librarians thought that “no one wants to read on a screen” on a screen and we heard that
And the hype about ebooks that had once existed in the media had changed to the message that ebooks were dead
But some libraries immediately saw the possibilities and once we added audio books to the collection a couple of years later
Things really took off
All of a sudden naysayers got it!
This meant that they would no longer have to carry around cases of sometimes twenty or more cds
In order to listen to an audio book
Eventually skepics were won over one over as they realize that yes--patrons really were reading on screens
So that's how I recall our beginning in a small store front
We've come an incredibly long way in twenty years
When we first met with OverDrive the company was in a store front
Now we have a beautiful big building
And over five hundred explores all over the world
We provide books in over a hundred languages and in many countries
This is because librarians like you
Overwhelming in public libraries
Have the vision to see our potential if we work together
And suggested many improvements over the years that were critical to our success
Remember, librarians were alive with ebooks years before the kindle was released
Because of your vision readers all over the world have more access to books
Librarians are amazing
You are amazing
Now how did our collection development team evolve
Karen Estrovich, whom a lot of you know, was the first leader this team
It had just a couple of people and they tried to figure out how to help
With selection in any way they could
The team was so small at first
And were concerned with helping all kinds of libraries select at that time. School, special libraries, and so forth
The collection was not robust enough
It was hard to help or to know what kind of help to offer
So the team tried to respond yes to all requests from our partners. And beyond that tried to highlight the best new to OverDrive titles they could find
They explained new features as they were added
New features for selectors especially
The team grew very slowly over the years and we added services as libraries asked for more help
Then the pandemic occured and we instantly got much busier
We were very lucky to be in a great position
All our employees had laptops and
The ability to connect from home
When COVID caused shutdowns of buildings we just packed up our laptops and headed to our home offices without much trouble
Because of the increased demand in libraries we added new position and higher new team members
This included a new manager for our collection development team
We got ourselves more organized and are now really ready to increase our library by library help
We've realized that because we just grew over the years without specific planning, except to help in any way we could, many of you might not know about all of our services
A few librarians asked for help
We tried to provide it and then shared it with other libraries but we didn't have the staff to make a big announcement
Now we are in a position to consult with you, save you time
And help make sure you don't miss titles
Because all 12 of us have worked in libraries and still have that public service point of view
We feel like we're all in the same team with you and just want to help
Actually
The are over a hundred librarians working throughout OverDrive's departments
We get you
And now
Sheila is going to explain that a bit more
Thank you Cindy, I love to hear the story of OverDrive history every time
And you're right it really points to something important about OverDrive
That's "we get you." For instance before I came to OverDrive I worked in the small public library that be long to an OverDrive consortium. I can still remember putting together my monthly parts in Marketplace well I was at the reference desk praying I would have a chance to buy them before the patron printer jammed again or I had to leave to set up for my program that night
Finding the time to manage your OverDrive collection can be difficult but you're responsible for a budget and want to make good choices in the little time you have
And then you want to make sure your patrons actually find all the great content you're buying. It can be tricky when time and money or at a premium
So this is where the OverDrive DCLs come in
We've made hundreds of lists to make it easier to find the titles you want to buy. These lists are created by release date, genre, popularity, audience level, and even price if you're looking for a deal
Many of the most popular lists can be found in Marketplace in the left hand menu of must haves on and on the featured tab. Your DCL can also help by making carts specifically for you. You should also feel free to reach out to your DCL or account manager if you would like additional shopping tips tailored to your needs
We can also assist with curation to help patrons browser your OverDrive collection. As well as manage special sales requests if you have a program or book club coming up and need a discount on a large number of a specific title
We also help with the maintenance of your collection
And more
Back to Meghan with
A little bit more about who we are
Thank you Sheila and this time I'm going to unmute. As I mentioned earlier each of you has an OverDrive team that is here to help you. This is comprised of an Account Manager who can help you with reporting, contacts, invoicing, and lots more. Your product support specialist who can help you with Libby and website issues, troubleshooting, campaigns, can provide you an excellent customer service for all your other needs. And of course your Digital Content Librarian team that's us! We all work in geographically located territory which allows for us to better understand the needs of your specific state or province and provide you with the services that are more tailored to your libraries district requirements. So without further do I present to your digital content ly very team and the specific regions which we cover. Also you can always find your specific DCL along with our contact information on the support tab in Marketplace. We're all in the chat right now so if you haven't already please say hello
Our manager is Dr. Tonya Briggs and she is the back bone of our team
Jane Whitehurst covers Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming.
Kristin Roccaforte works with libraries in California and Hawaii.
Maria Fesz is our DCL Team Lead, along with providing assistance to libraries in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
Cindy Orr, whom you should be familiar with by now, is our Digital Content Advisor, working with all of us to help our library partners.
Alicia Adams works with libraries in Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, Tennesse, and Virginia.
Claire Weibel assists with libraries in New York, Ohio*,
Pennslyvaina, and West Virginia.
Sarah Filiberto is DCL for Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut,
Maine,
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Rhode Island, Utah, and Vermont.
Shelia Mawdsley, another of our presenters, works with libraries in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
Tori Casper is the DCL for Arkansas, Florida, Louisianna, and Mississippi, along with working as a liaison with our Content Metadata team to assist with any title-related issues that might arise.
And rounding out our U.S.-DCLs is me, Meghan Volchko, and I work with libraries in Illinois, Michigan, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wisconsin.
Erin Kane is the DCL for the country of Canada, and is an expert at Canadian content and publishing.
To make sure that you can get the hot new titles on your shelves by street date
Our team has made a list of the sources we think you use or would like to use if you had time because
A lot of the demand for patrons
For new titles
We divided these sources among us and we checked them every week
We then with the hot titles into our carts for you to use as far in advance of publication as possible
We're happy to help you build your digital collection as well if you need help but here are the sources we check
Regularly for newly published digital books
When I first began my public library career in the early 1970s
The publishing industry was very different
Readers and even librarians didn't know what new books were coming
Untill they were reviewed in Kirkus, LJ, or Booklist
Only a couple of weeks before publication
Far too
Late for librarians to select order process them and get them on the shelf
The only practical way to find out about new books in those days was to visit a bookstore to see what was new
Now not only do librarians know about forthcoming book so do readers and they expect their libraries to deliver those books on street date
Over the many years our team worked in public libraries, the sources we tried to keep current with
So as not to miss any upcoming hot titles
You used the same ones and some of these 70s review sources we used fifty years ago are still in business
Okay is that all the titles that we track?
I think that's all of them and that's a lot of sources so
We look at all of those, what happens next?
After we check all these resources you would never have the time to check on your own
We put together lists like This Week’s Biggest Books and Next Week’s Biggest Books both updated every Friday
You can always find these lists on the resource center as well as the previous three weeks in case you missed a week when you took a well earned vacation
While you're at the resource center you can also check out things like Coming Blockbusters for the following month and other monthly lists of hot titles by genre. Thereby avoiding that embarrassing moment when a patron says, “But how did you forget to buy THAT.”
And if you want all of these great
Monthly lists in one place
We are now compiling them into a single blog post that's featured at the beginning of every month. You can sign up to receive a notification of collection development blogs or simply head directly over to the OverDrive blog when you're ready to check out
Months recommended lists
You don't want to miss
Guess what
We don't just use these lists to help you with shopping
We also use them for curation
Did you ever wonder where those lists come from on a library's Libby page?
Libraries are welcome to make their own lists but the OverDrive DCLs make and update dozens of those lists every month. You can use the lists we make to curate your own collection
Or you can talk to your DCL about help with curation
Your DCL is also more than happy to work with your product support specialist (PSS) to create guides to feature specific areas of your collection
For instance say romance as well with your patrons and so you've bought plenty of it
Now you want to show it off
Your PSS can set up a guide where your DCL can work with you to put up the romance lists that will best appeal to your patrons
This can be sweet less like Amish Romance; steamy lists, like Spicy Romance; and everything in between
We'll make sure you get the right mix of lists to best promote your collection to your patrons. And we can do the same with mystery guides, guides for kids and teens, or whatever else will be perfect for you
Here's Meghan with some more specifics about how we can help
Okay great so you know who we are and what we do for all of our library partners but what are some things that we can do to help with your library specifically
Curation of your Libby site. We can help with curating your live home page to make sure that its bell of fun relevant list for your patrons
We also push forty six curated lists for adult juvenile and ya audiences to every collection each month to assist in your curation. For this February we included seasonal lists like a Black History Month list, a Valentine’s Day list, along with lists of the recently announced ALA Youth Media Awards, along with a fun list of titles featuring DRAGONS! These collections will only include titles that are already in your collection and ready for your patrons to borrow or place holds
Assistance with carts. We all know that one of the fun things about being a collection development librarian is the shopping! We all love books and we all love seeing the books that we buy end up in the hands of happy readers. We also know that sometimes you don't have the time to shop in the ways that you should or maybe you're just in need of a bit of assistance with a specialized area
That's where we can help. The DCL team is happy to assist you with making carts to assist with end of your spend, a new grant, whatever you need
Some fun cards we've made recently include a thousand dollar cart of juvenile titles focused on our neurodiversity and mental health, autism and asthma for a children's group at a library including a bunch of picture and chapter books to make the materials accessible for all their younger patrons. A collection of cook books for a regional chef and cooking class (in this case it was mid-western which makes my Ohio based heart happy) which was part of a larger panel discussion on regional cuisine
Purchasing carts made by a partner while they went on vacation but had no one else at their library to buy and make sure that their patrons got the titles when they hit their street date and not a week later
A large collection of backlist one copy one user content to better established a library's collection as more of a branch than a place to exclusively get new best sellers. We will work with your timelines and we're happy to get any projects rolling whenever you need us
Help with creating Notify Me, Holds Managers, and other automated plans in Marketplace. While Marketplace has many tools in it to make shopping for what your patrons want and need a bit easier and faster, sometimes these newer plans such as Notify Me and Holds Manager can have a bit of a learning curb to them. Luckyily we are experts on the ins and outs of these plans and will gladly discuss setting them up in a way that's most beneficial to your library. Diversity equity and inclusion audits for your collection. We know that you want your colection, both physical and digital, to be as inclusive as possible. Which is why OverDrive created the DEI audit early three years ago. They are free for your library and in addition to the report itself your Digital Content Librarian will take the time to go through report and extra materials to make sure that you understand the results and we can offer suggestions to help you reach your DEO goals for your collection. Marketplace shopping tips and tricks we p
Special requests. Are you having a city wide read? Maybe the author is coming to visit. Maybe not
Regardless you can reach out to us and we can work with you on getting your library special lending models or pricing for your upcoming read. Gneral advice and best practices. I'm sure that at least one of you on this call has a question that seems like it would fit our team but maybe not in the budgets above
While my thought on that is to ask. We want to help you with anything we can related to collection development, books, Marketplace, Libby, the sky's the limit
We want to ensure that our team is accessible to all of you and that you understand you can reach out to us at any time
Onto Shelia
Okay that was a lot quick recap because I know we're close to time
First of all one thing that you really to remember is everything we've mentioned here is
Included
In your service
As an OverDrive library. There is no extra cost to anything we've mentioned today. Also you can always get help in Marketplace on the help page
Our team is hard at work to make your shopping experience easier
And we're here to help you whether you are a small library that's part of a large consortium or standalone library serving millions
Regardless of size you've got your own dedicated DCL who will be happy to help with carts
Or to help you with your curation
So that you get the circs that you deserve
The best way to keep up on hot books that are out now or can be found in
Can be found in three places
The must haves on the left side of the Marketplace home page, the featured tab Marketplace, and the resource center
To receive the top lists all at once for the month
Sign up to the collection development blogs
And if you want to say current with fun trends and see where your patrons are seeing check out the Libby Life blog as well. It's aimed at patrons and has a lot about what's hot in the book world
Plus you'll see Meghan and me pop up there from time to time
The final tip
Most new books come out Tuesday. If you can buy new releases on the day they come out you make a lot of patrons happy. But if not Tuesday
Do your best to shop Wednesday through Friday
Because folks love to have a book for the weekend
Thank you Shelia, thank you Meghan and Cindy for that excellent history and all of the tips and tricks that your DCL can help your library with. Now as we wrap up in our final minutes don't forget to join us for an upcoming webinar how to train your community on Libby on March 7th at 2:00 PM Eastern. We collaborate with our digital bookmobile team to teach you how to host your very own Libby training. As follow up from today you will receive a recording link and a copy of this presentation as well as a survey on this session so keep an eye out for that from zoom around this time tomorrow
A quick plug for the first time ever we are introducing The Libby's, the inaugural Libby book awards where we put books in the spotlight and they're nominated by our expert panel of librarians. These DCL's on the screen here. These books will then be voted on by librarians and library workers all across north america and winners will be chosen in each category. Once we have all the votes tallied the winners will be announced live on March 12th at 7:00 PM Eastern. You can register to watch the Libby Book Awards. The ceremony will be presented by the hosts of the Professional Book Nerds podcast, myself and Joe Skelley, on Zoom, YouTube, or Facebook live
We want to say thank you so much for watching this session and spending your time with us. As a reminder you will receive follow up materials tomorrow from Zoom. With that have a wonderful day and happy reading!