Okay, welcome to today's webinar. This is Susan Nisley at the Nebraska Library Commission, and this session is an introduction to the Nebraska Overdrive Libraries Collection and Group Purchase. We have done training on overdrive in the past, and I used to always try to do a training session when we had new members join, but we haven't had a large group of new members in the recent future, so it's been a while since I've done an online training session and we wanted to go ahead and provide updated information and also get a recording up there that's more current. I think the previous training that we have online as a recording is a couple of years old, so this should give us a good chance to reach out to new librarians who have recently started working at libraries that belong to the Nebraska Overdrive Libraries Group and also get, like I said, updated information out there. In today's session, I want to give you background information on the group as a whole. I want to talk a little bit about the history of how we got started, how we funded the group. I want to talk a little bit about how we do collection development. I want to give you some background information on some of the licensing models that we have to work with. The reason I want to give you this background information is because sometimes it's really helpful to have it when you are talking to patrons. Not every patron conversation requires you to know all of this background information, but sometimes if they have a question or a comment or a complaint about the way things are. If you know some of the background information and can share that with them, it sometimes helps them understand and not feel as put out by something that perhaps bothers them. It gives them a little bit of understanding if you can give them that background information. I'm also going to review the circulation policies that the group has decided upon. We're going to talk a little bit about file formats because that's important in terms of choosing which titles to check out. Then we're going to go and move on to the site demo. I hope that we'll at least have half an hour for the site demo so we'll see how we move through the material. To start out, just to give you background information, the Nebraska Overdrive Libraries Group is a group of Nebraska libraries that join together with support from the Nebraska Library Commission to share the cost of offering an overdrive downloadable audiobook ebook collection to their patrons, Nebraska citizens or residents. One of the reasons that we had to band together is because the cost of setting up an overdrive collection, the initial set up costs are or were still are quite high. It was really too much for any one library to bear by themselves. The two exceptions being Lincoln City Libraries and Nebraska and Omaha Public Library. Both of those libraries have their own overdrive collections which they actually got set up and running before our Nebraska Overdrive Libraries Group got set up and running. A group of libraries first started talking about trying to get together and work as a group to get access to downloadable digital audiobooks in December of 2006. It took quite a while to decide how to proceed to come up with some models that we thought would work and it wasn't until March 2008 that the group and the site actually went live. When we first started, went live in March 2008, the Nebraska Overdrive Libraries Group had 25 member libraries. At that time we were just buying downloadable audiobooks. I think ebooks were available but at that time they weren't the hot items that they are today and so we did our initial goal was to have a collection of downloadable audiobooks. We started with 496 downloadable audiobooks. As you can imagine, within a day or so all of those books were checked out. We had 25 member libraries, 496 audiobooks, almost all of which were checked out that first week or so. That was a little dicey. We continued to focus on audiobooks exclusively until July 2010 and at that point we did start buying ebooks. I like to mention this because a number of libraries have joined after July 2010 and so some of them actually aren't even aware. Some of them over the years I've discovered that they weren't even really that aware of the fact that the group purchased audiobooks as well or that we initially started with audiobooks. We've had some libraries talk about the fact that they're not interested in audiobooks at all. They don't necessarily want the budget to go to audiobooks. Not necessarily realizing that the initial purpose of the group was audiobooks and we actually had, especially those initial libraries, they really built up a large population of audiobook users in that initial two-year period where we only purchased audiobooks. We now do purchase both audiobooks and ebooks. That's sometimes helpful to remember that we started out with audiobooks and then we added ebooks. Today we have 170 member libraries participating. All but one of those libraries are public libraries. One of our initial 25 members was a school library and they sort of got in and they were kind of grandfathered in. Subsequently, Overdrive stopped allowing school libraries to participate in what they considered a public library consortium. We do have one school library that was grandfathered in. These 170 libraries serve a population of over 680,000. You can see this group serves a third of the population in Nebraska. The other portions of the population largely are served by Omaha Public Library and Lincoln City Libraries. We do a large percentage of the population in Nebraska does have access to an Overdrive collection whether through Lincoln City Libraries Omaha Public Library or through the Nebraska Overdrive Libraries group. Today we have over 9,000 audiobook titles in our collection and over 21,000 ebooks in our collection. We have grown immeasurably since we started out with those 496 audiobooks. To give you a little bit of background on funding and this sort of gives you an idea of what I mean when I said the initial setup costs were too great for many of our Nebraska libraries to bear on their own outside of a group setting. The initial cost to create the group website was $28,000 and so the Nebraska Library Commission did pick up that initial $28,000 investment. There's also an annual maintenance fee that has to be paid to Overdrive and initially that was $12,000 per year and it remained steady at that rate through 2015. In 2016 we started a new five-year contract and that does build in a $2,000 annual increase to that maintenance fee. So this past year we paid $14,000. Next year we'll pay $16,000, etc. That maintenance fee is also something that the Nebraska Library Commission pays for and has taken that on as one of our contributions to the group. The nice thing about the Library Commission being able to pay the maintenance fee is that then all of the money that you contribute annually through paying your annual participation fee that all goes into our collection development pot. Each of your libraries pays either ten cents per population served or a minimum of $500 to participate. When we add all of those contributions together that comes this past year, for this upcoming year we just finished the renewal period where people re-upped for the next year. For this coming year we've got $119,445 in our collection development pot contributed by member libraries. The past couple of years we've also gotten special appropriations from the legislature. The legislature set aside some money for what they call Nebraska e-reads and this is to it's administered by the Nebraska Library Commission and the intent is to make e-books and audiobooks available statewide and so we do that by splitting funds proportionally based on pop-serve between the Nebraska Overdrive Libraries Group, Omaha Public Library and Lincoln City Libraries. The Nebraska Overdrive Libraries portion of e-reads funding for this upcoming year is $94,000 and so when you add that to your contributions to the group collection development budget that brings us up to $214,000 for purchasing books from October 1st 2016 through September 30th 2017 and one of the things I like to mention to people is that $500 is a big amount of money for libraries with small budgets and so sometimes you do get pushed back from your funding sources, your library board or your city. One of the things that I think might be helpful is to say we contribute $500 but it gives us basically it gives us access to $214,000 of buying power and content and that's just new content in this upcoming year and that doesn't count for all of the content purchased in the past that's still in the collection so you're getting access to $214,000 of buying power during this next year so that's just kind of a helpful way to talk about it with people who might question spending money to belong to the Nebraska Overdrive Libraries group. So if you haven't been a member of the group for a long time you might not have heard a lot of discussion about how we do collection development. Basically we have two volunteer selectors from member libraries who've been purchasing or making purchase suggestions or selections for us for some time. Our primary purchaser or selector for adult fiction is Mary Joe Mack. She's the director of this John Stahl Library in West Point and you've got her email address up on the screen and then Karen Drivo from Norfolk Public Library purchases adult nonfiction titles and juvenile and young adult titles. The reason we have limited purchasing permission to people is just to make it easier with 170 libraries. It would be hard to manage collection development with more people involved. We know a lot of people would be afraid to log into the administrative module if they thought that they might accidentally purchase something and so we have limited purchase permissions for the group to these two individuals. Other people purchase permissions include me and Debra Dregos who's the director of my department at the Nebraska Library Commission and Debra actually goes in on a pretty regular basis and she checks holds and if there's a lot of holds on a title she'll purchase additional copies of a title. If we've gotten some suggestions she'll purchase suggestions that we've received from patrons or librarians and we also always kind of try to be on the lookout. Sometimes we have some books in a series and other books in the series haven't been available to purchase through Overdrive and so she keeps an eye out often to see if additional series titles have become available so that we can fill in gaps in series. Even though we've limited purchase permissions we definitely want everyone to feel like they can make suggestions so you've got Mary Joe's email address, Karen Dreevo's email address. You can email suggestions to them of titles you're interested in having added to the collection. You can also contact me and Debra with suggestions. You can also get into the Overdrive Marketplace which is what I'm going to talk about in the November Overdrive session so you could actually search and see what titles are potentially available to purchase for our collection and so we'll talk about how you can do that if you really want to be able to get in there and see if a title is available before you make a suggestion. So that's something we'll talk about in November in more depth. To give you some idea about how we sort of divvy up our collection development budget, for the last couple of years we've gone with a 50-50 split between audiobooks and ebooks. One thing to keep in mind here is that audiobooks on average cost more than ebooks. I double checked and the average cost of an audiobook is $55. The average cost of an ebook is $22 so we have 50% of our budget for audiobooks because they're more expensive. That means we don't buy as many audiobooks as we do ebooks. Within each of those two budget categories, audiobook and ebook, we further divide the funds as follows. Adult fiction, we spend about 57% of our budget on adult fiction. 20% on adult nonfiction and 23% on juvenile young titles. Now comes content licensing models. This information is just good to have in the back of your mind so that sometimes it comes in handy when you're talking to patrons and they're asking why we don't have more copies of a particularly popular title or why a title hasn't been purchased or why a title that used to be available is no longer available. When we first started buying audiobooks and then ebooks from Overdrive, all the titles we purchased were available on a one copy, one user model. That's just like print. It means if the group, the consortium, owns one copy of a title, then one person can have it checked out at a time. If someone else is interested in that title that's checked out, they'd have to place a hold on it. If we want more than one person to be able to have that title checked out at one time, then we'd have to purchase more than one copy of that title. So one book, one user. Once we'd purchase a copy under this licensing model, we would own it essentially forever as long as it's available through the service. So and for the most part, that's been true. So buy it once and you have access forever. Almost all the audiobooks in our collection are available under this licensing model. The only exception are the Harry Potter titles which we purchased. They were only offered on a you purchase a copy and it's available for five years. So with that exception, all audiobooks are purchased under one copy, one user licensing model. And right now about 70% of the ebooks in our collection were purchased under this model. Starting in 2011, we suddenly had a publisher Harper Collins that decided they were no longer comfortable with that one copy, one user perpetual access model. And so they decided that they were only going to make their books available using a 26 checkout meter to access model. So we'd buy a book from Harper Collins. It could be checked out 26 times and at that point the book expired and if we wanted to continue to have access to it, we'd have to purchase another copy. Initially that was very unpopular. Librarians were very unhappy about that. Our unhappiness didn't make any difference though. Harper Collins didn't reconsider. Since then, that actual actually that 26 checkout model is not looking so bad because of some of the other licensing models that have been introduced. Simon and Schuster makes books available for 12 months. And after 12 months, they expire. This is really frustrating because it might mean that a book is only checked out 10 or 11 times. And then if it doesn't get, if you know, once that year is up, your access is over and you have to decide whether to purchase it or not. And so that's why sometimes, you know, we don't choose to repurchase the title if it hasn't circulated a lot and if it's fairly expensive. Scholastic makes books available for 24 months and then they expire. McMillan has a model that says the earlier of 52 checkouts are 24 months. So, you know, if a book gets checked out 52 times in 15 months, it then is no longer available or if it's not checked out 52 times, it goes away after 24 months regardless. Penguin Publishing Group, for quite some time, they made books available for a 12 month time period and then they expired. They subsequently switched to a one copy one user model. But when they did that, they increased their prices quite a bit. So, again, this makes decisions about whether to repurchase titles a little bit more difficult. If a title is really inexpensive and you only have access to it for 12 months, you don't necessarily mind buying a copy if it's $6.99 and you get access for 12 months and, you know, that that's not too hard of a decision to make but if it costs a lot more and you're only going to have access to it, if it's a lot more and it's not a popular book, then it may be a little harder to make that decision. So, again, that gives you a little bit of background information on why sometimes we may choose not to repurchase a title. It also is something to keep in mind. We have, because we purchased some of these time metered titles in the past, we've got, we do have some titles that are disappearing from our collection every couple of days. So, we kind of have a, which makes it really hard from a statistics point of view to, you know, any time you say how many titles do you have in your collection, it's kind of a moving target because we have titles that are expiring on new titles being added. Just as a review, and these are decisions that our group made as a whole by a majority vote, currently we limit patrons to checking out six titles at a time. When we first started out back in 2008, patrons could only check out three titles at a time. At one point along the way, we increased that to four titles and now we are at six titles. We've also limited people to only being able to put three titles on hold at one time. And this is, of course, does frustrate people, but on the other hand, one of the biggest complaints we get from patrons is that hold lists are so long. So many titles are checked out and have lots of holes on them that frustrates them. And so we want to do something to make people a little bit judicious about which titles they put holes on so that people aren't frustrated any more than they have to be by long hold lists. As far as how long a patron can have an item checked out, there is some flexibility. We've set it up so that when a patron first logs into their account, if they don't make any changes, the default checkout period for ebooks and audiobooks is both 14 days. But patrons can go in and make some adjustments to their own personal default checkout periods. Audiobooks, they have two choices. They can choose seven days or 14 days. And ebooks, they can choose seven, 14 or 21 days. And I will show you where to get in and change those settings in an individual account. You'll also see in that little screenshot at the bottom of the page, it says die for her. This shows right before a patron would click on the borrow button. It does give them an option to change the checkout time if they're logged into their account. So there's kind of a reminder of what their default checkout period is for the title. And there's a little change link that they can click on if they want to change the checkout period within options provided at the time of checkout. I want to say just a little bit about DRM because I'm going to reference it in the next couple of slides when we talk about file format. DRM stands for digital rights management, and it's basically a technology that controls or limits what you can do with a digital media file. One thing to keep in mind is that there are different flavors or brands of DRM, and that sometimes has implications for what you can do with particular files and which sorts of devices and computers you can download a particular file to. So I want to review file formats available for eBooks first. Probably the most popular file format and the file format that the majority of eBooks in Overdrive are available in is EPUB. The nice thing about EPUB file format is that it has reflowable text and so lines are going to break in an appropriate place regardless of whether you're on a full-size computer screen or whether you're on a cell phone and have a small screen. The text is going to adjust and be readable on either type of screen. EPUB files can be downloaded to a computer that has Adobe Digital Editions free software on it. It can also be downloaded to a mobile device like a phone or a tablet using the Overdrive app. EPUB files can be protected with Adobe DRM, and the majority of eBooks available through the Overdrive collection are protected using Adobe DRM, and so those will be referred to as Adobe EPUB files. EPUB files can be DRM free also and those are referred to as Open EPUB files and you will occasionally find a title that is available in that Open EPUB format in Overdrive. Another file format you'll see occasionally is PDF. Some of the titles are available in PDF. This is going to be most valuable when you're talking about a book where a static layout is important. So if you've got lots of charts or diagrams or images, that static layout is going to be important. The limitation of PDF is that you can't really easily resize the screen. You can zoom in or out, but if you're on a small device that's not going to work well, and in fact the Overdrive app, if you need to use the Overdrive app on a mobile device like a phone, that does not support downloading PDF. Usually you would use PDF if you're on a computer and you can download it to Adobe Digital Editions. Again, PDF files can be protected with Adobe DRM or they can be DRM free in which case they're referred to as Open PDF. There are two additional file formats you will run across. Kindle is one format and one thing that's important about this is Overdrive is really as far as I know the only sort of ebook service provider to libraries that was able to get access to and provide books in Kindle format. So they are unique that way. People who have Kindle devices like a Kindle eReader, like a Paperwhite, they can only read books on that device that are available in Kindle format. So you're going to have a subset of your population that needs to make sure that a book's available in Kindle format before they can check it out from Overdrive and use it. I'd say a majority of our ebooks are available in Kindle format but not all of them and so that's something I'm going to show you how to kind of keep an eye out for when we're looking at the actual interface. So Kindle format books are required if you've got a Kindle eReader but they can also be read if you've got a Kindle app on a tablet or a phone. The Kindle file format is protected by an Amazon proprietary DRM and so those files will have a file format suffix of AZW. Finally there's a format called Overdrive Read and this is something that Overdrive introduced to try to make access to the ebook content easier. Overdrive Read format ebooks can be read immediately via a current web browser on your computer or mobile device. They require no additional software so you don't have to have the Overdrive app or Kindle app or anything like that. You don't need to download additional software or activate it with any sort of ID. The nice thing about Overdrive Read books is you can save them or download them to your cache and bookmark them and then have access to that text when you're offline so if you know you're going to be someplace and you don't have internet access but you need to use that Overdrive Read format you can still often take advantage of an offline reading option. There's a subset of Overdrive Read titles that also include professional narration so you can read it and listen to it at the same time. This is primarily kids books that have this format and some Overdrive Read books also come with what they call a fixed layout. Again that's going to work best on a larger screen device but again it's like a picture book where if you shrink the page down too much it's not going to be very legible on a cell phone or something like that. Moving on to audiobook file formats we have currently you're going to find two audiobook file formats. I think almost every audiobook we have is available in mp3 format. The mp3 format can be downloaded directly to mobile devices using the Overdrive mobile app. It can be downloaded to Windows and Mac computers using Overdrive for Windows or Overdrive for Mac software and you can either listen to it on the computer or you can then transfer it to a little standalone mp3 player an iPod or burn it to a CD. There's also in in many instances an Overdrive Listen format available and this is comparable to the Overdrive Read. It lets users listen to an audiobook immediately via their current web browser on either a computer or a mobile device. So again no additional software to download or activate. The one difference between Overdrive Read and Overdrive Listen is that the Overdrive Listen because it's a streaming service it's not available for offline access so you do have to be connected to the internet in order to take advantage of Overdrive Listen. And I have one more file that talks about file format and I just want to mention this because some of you and some of your patrons may remember WMA format as something that was available. This file format was discontinued and removed from Overdrive in May 2015. When we first started in 2008 purchasing audiobooks almost every single audiobook was only available in the WMA format. A few were also available in mp3. WMA format audiobooks are protected by a Windows DRM. So in the beginning audiobook publishers were really worried about they really wanted to restrict usage. They were really afraid of their products being shared and you know losing business they thought you know they were worried thinking that what had happened with file sharing and music was going to happen with file sharing and audiobooks so they really wanted to lock down their audiobook content. But that WMA Windows DRM made the audiobooks trickier and harder to use. For instance WMA audiobooks couldn't be downloaded to max at all. They had to be downloaded to a Windows computer. They could be listened to on a Windows computer or transferred to an mp3 player but that mp3 player had to be capable of playing protected WMA files. Most mp3 players were but every once in a while someone would come across somebody would have an mp3 player that wasn't capable of playing protected WMA files. WMA files couldn't be burned to cd and they couldn't be downloaded directly to mobile devices like smartphones or tablets via the Overdrive app. So over the years what Overdrive did is they really worked with the publishers and worked on getting more and more of them to make more and more titles available in that mp3 format which is much easier for patrons to use and is downloadable to many more devices. Eventually they kind of got to a tipping point where they decided they were going to sort of they were sort of going to kind of give an ultimatum to the publishers and they basically said okay at this point we're not going to deal with WMA anymore and when they gave that ultimatum to publishers they did get some more to come on board with mp3 format for audiobooks and then they did sort of have a drop dead date in May 2015 and the publishers that only provided WMA audiobooks were no longer those titles were no longer available through Overdrive. We did actually lose about a thousand titles from our collection at that point we did get some credit back from Overdrive to make up partly for that loss and so you know you can look at that as a negative or positive. We did lose some content but we also now only have mp3 audiobook format audiobooks in the collection which is much easier to deal with and they're much more accessible to patrons so overall I think it's a positive but I just want to even though those aren't available anymore many of you and many of your patrons probably remember some things about the WMA audiobooks so just to be clear that format's no longer available. Quickly all titles can be returned early with a few exceptions if you download an mp3 audiobook to a mac those cannot be returned early. Open pdf ebooks can't be returned early and then this final bullet point I didn't come up with a really good way to word this I couldn't forget how to word this to be clear but basically open epub ebooks can be returned early if you've downloaded them using the Overdrive app for an Android device a Chromebook an Apple device using the iOS operating system or Windows 8 operating system in other instances open epub ebooks cannot be returned early but again only a small subset of our titles are available in that open epub format. If books are not returned early by the patrons they will return themselves automatically on their due date down to the minute and I have a little screenshot showing you I think up until you know when you've got several days left it will say it expires in one day expires in two days once you get to the specific day on which it retire it expires I believe you do get a down to the minute countdown that's important because sometimes patrons think they have the whole day you know they they think okay well it's due tomorrow but I have all day to read it well that may not be true it's going to depend on what time they originally checked the book out two weeks ago or three weeks ago that's going to determine when it suddenly is no longer available in their collection. We always get the question about whether it's possible to renew titles and it is not possible to renew them per se it's not called renewal but you can as long as nobody's place to hold on the title you can check it out again as soon as it is returned or expires. One thing that I do if I know I'm not going to get a book done by the time it expires if there are no holes on it and maybe it's going to be due in two days and I know I'm not going to get it done you know I worry well what if somebody places a hold on the next two days and I'm not going to be able to check it out again sometimes I'll actually return my book early and then turn around and check it out again so I've got it for another two or three weeks so that's that's the way you can counsel your patrons as far as if they need to check the book out a second time. Okay we are now going to move on to the demo before I do that I just want to ask does anybody have any questions about what we've talked about so far? If not I'll go ahead then and we'll start talking about the actual Nebraska Overdrive site and how you use it and we're a little further along in our hour than I hoped would be at this point but I will probably hopefully I'll get most of it covered and I'll I'll go a little long if necessary and I hope that works out for you. So when you first you and your patrons first come to the Nebraska Overdrive Library site you have an option your patrons can sign in right away if they want to or they can wait until they're prompted to sign in which they'll be prompted at the time they perform an action that requires you to be signed in so once they click on a borrow button they'll be prompted to log in if they try to place a hold on a title they'll be prompted to log in if they try to add a book to a wish list they'll be prompted to log in. The primary reason to encourage patrons to sign in right away would be if your library participates in the Overdrive Advantage program. The Overdrive Advantage program allows libraries to purchase unique titles and additional copies of popular titles for the exclusive use of their own patrons and signing in would allow patrons of those libraries to see those additional titles and copies. We have about 37 libraries in our Nebraska Overdrive Libraries group that participate in the Overdrive program and you can see a list of those libraries by clicking on this see if your library offers more titles link. So this is a list of libraries that do participate in the Advantage program and that also explains why you'll sometimes see these little A advantage icons on titles. So I'm scrolling down here and you'll see under World War II fact and fiction this category you see some A icons on some titles if you hover over that it will tell you your library may offer more copies of this title sign in to check availability. So right now they don't know which library I'm associated with so they're seeing at least one library that's part of this consortium has purchased an additional copy. We don't know if it's your library or not if you want to see sign in. So this would be a point at which you could click to sign in you're prompted to select your library it usually remembers which library you last logged in as so it remembers that I am logging in with a Shadron Public Library card. My library card number and pin are already entered and then I sign in now I've got image of the book and if I hover over the icon now it will tell me your library has purchased additional copies of this title. So that means sometimes when you're not signed in you'll see a title and it will be checked out it doesn't look like you can nothing's available for you to check out but once you sign in you may find that there is an additional title an additional copy of that title available to you through your own library to check out. As far as how much advantage costs to set up an advantage account this first number is going to scare you but this is sort of their non-promotional price and I don't think that anybody's paid this price for a while. Their non-promotional cost to set up an advantage account is a thousand dollars. The positive aspect of that is that entire thousand dollars is added to a library's marketplace account as a credit and then they can spend that entire thousand dollars on books. For months now Overdrive has been running a promotion and they don't have you know as far as I know they're going to continue to run it they will give a library an option or a selection of maybe six or nine books and tell the library you have to pick you have to purchase at least three books out of this list and then we'll set you up with an advantage account and it's possible if depending on which of the three titles you select they could cost under 50 dollars so so it doesn't with the promotions going on it doesn't cost a lot of money to sign up for an advantage account but that does mean you're going to have to be responsible for doing some of your own collection development for any titles you'd want to make available to your own patrons so anyway I just want to mention that so that you'll understand if you are an advantage library why you want to encourage your patrons to sign in right away for those of you who aren't an advantage library it explains why you've got those little A icons on the covers of some books so what I really want to focus on now is how you can help your patrons navigate the overdrive website in order to identify titles to check out you have a number of options as far as searching or browsing for titles there's a basic search box up here at the top of the screen where you can type in keywords from the author or the title or subject of the book there's an advanced search screen you can go to and then there's also a number of browse options on the main screen front and center today this just showed up today we are currently in a two-week period where they have a big library read promotion where all of our patrons have unlimited access to the book this is where it ends and so that's showing up right on top of our screen today normally the first thing your patrons would see on their screen would be the new ebooks category below the new ebooks category there's a new audiobooks category in both of these cases these are invitations for patrons to browse in both cases these are format specific if you continue to scroll down you'll see new releases category and in this particular case this is not format specific so you've got a combination of ebooks and audiobooks at this point I want to point out in the upper right hand corner of each book cover image you will see a format type indicator so in the first line of new releases you've got five books that have the book image icon in the upper right hand corner those are ebooks the last book in the row avid reader that format icon is a headset and that indicates that's an audiobook we've got a special collection that we set up at one point with world war two fact and fiction and then another category down here lost in the virtual stacks which tries to get people to check out titles that haven't been checked out as much you also up at the top of the screen have additional ebook categories you can search and these categories can always be toggled on or off using this menu icon so it can be turned off or it can be turned on depending what happens most often is um and it's just human nature the first category that people see on the screen when they come to this website they see the new ebooks and so what's going to happen most often is your patrons are going to start looking at new ebooks there are 12 new ebooks displayed on the screen and then there's a few more link that you can click on to see additional titles and this is really what I think most patrons start doing um one thing that I want to point out um in the past when you selected one of these categories like new ebooks all you saw you saw basically 200 titles they they capped the the um result list of 200 titles now they actually show you all the titles in the collection all the ebooks in the collection but they have sorted it by date added to sites so the titles that have been most recently added to the site are going to show up first so we've got a result list uh we have 24 uh titles displayed on this result list up at the top we have this number that tells us we have 885 excuse me pages of results if you scroll down to the bottom of the page you get actual number of titles so on this page you're viewing 1 through 24 out of 21,226 ebooks so this is a good place to get just a number if you want to know how many ebooks are in our collection there's 21,226 unique ebook titles available in our collection I will point out on this screen the other important piece of information to be aware of on this if you look at that format type indicator icon in the upper corner of each screen not only does it tell you that these are all ebooks but you can also see in some cases that book icon is grayed out and that tells you that those particular titles are checked out so in this uh this row right here uh you've got three out of four titles checked out this row right here all four titles are checked out and this is probably one of the biggest uh complaints or stumbling blocks patrons have when using this service and I've had several uh librarians talk to me about this recently a patron will start browsing and it will seem like every single title is checked out to them almost so you know you're scrolling through this list checked out checked out checked out checked out you know here's one that's available but it looks like it's a kid's title you know they'll go through page after page and they'll complain that almost everything is checked out the best way to deal with that is if you come over here on the left where we've got filters you'll see we're already filtering to just ebooks because we selected the new ebook category but you also have the option of viewing all titles or titles that are available now this is hugely important to share with your patrons if they want to just look at titles that they can currently check out right away without having to place a hold have them click on available now and that filters out all the titles that are already checked out if you scroll down to the bottom of the screen you'll see we went from 21 000 titles total in the collection ebooks to 13 635 ebooks that are available to check out right now and so the patrons will have a much more positive browsing experience if they're only viewing titles that are available um I ran the numbers and the numbers indicate we've got about 60 percent of the ebook collection is available to check out 40 percent is checked out currently um and one thing to think about this really brings to mind the difference between a physical collection and a virtual collection um you probably have a fairly large percentage of your actual physical collection that's checked out at any one time but wait when patrons come in and browse the shelves they only see the titles that are currently available for them to check out they don't see all the titles that aren't on the shelves because they're in someone's home so trading your patrons in how to toggle between all titles and titles that are available now gets them back into that experience that they're more used to in the physical library so so that they're only looking at titles that they can actually check out and quote take with them unquote today for now I'm going to go back to all titles um sort of the default resultless display is cover images only you can get a lot of information from the cover image you can see as we said using that icon in the upper right hand corner of the book whether it's an ebook or audiobook whether it's currently available or checked out you get the title of the book the author of the book if you hover your mouse icon over the book title you will have an option to either place a hold or if a book is available to check out you have the option of borrowing it you also have the option of reading a sample of the book you can add a title to your wish list and you'll see I already added this title to the wish list associated with this account I can remove the title from my wish list or add it again you can share information about the book using social media sometimes I'll email the title of a book to a friend if I just want them to know hey this book's available you might like it if you like to post to social media like Facebook or Twitter about what you're reading this is a good way to get that post started with information and then cover image of the book if you want more information about the book you can click on the more icon right here and that will take you to the detailed record for the book before we look at the detailed record I want to go back and I just want to show you this other result list display option because some of your patrons may like it better you can do a list option it gives you the same information plus a little additional information that you don't see when you're just viewing cover images you again get the icon showing whether an item is available or checked out you have the title in the author but you also get series information so for example Bridget Jones baby is part of a series and it's book four in the series that's information you don't see by the other display you'll also see information about how many copies of the title are owned by the consortium or are or are available to you and how many people are on the waiting list so it looks like available copies zero of one so that tells you the consortium owns one copy of this title and that one copy is not available because it's currently checked out not only is it checked out but there's one person on the waiting list so you would have the option of placing a hold and you would be the second person on the waiting list you also get about three sentences from the synopsis of the book so sometimes it's nice to see that synopsis and not just the cover image depending so again some of you some of your patrons might like this display better and so I just want to point out that that's an option as far as then going into the detailed view for a particular title I'm going to go ahead and go down here and go into the other boy you can either click on the title itself or as I said click on this little more icon clicking both of those places will get you to the detailed record for this book and there is important information on this screen it's tempting sometimes to just click on the borrow icon at this point and borrow the book and in some cases that's going to be fine it's not going to be a problem but in other cases depending on what limitations your patrons might have in terms of the type of format they can handle it may make more sense to direct them them to this screen so important information on the screen it tells you exactly what formats what ebook file formats this book is available in so when you check this book out you'll be able to have it delivered in Kindle format so if your patrons own a Kindle e-reader and they have to have it available in Kindle format they know that they can check this book out it's available in that overdrive read option which can be read directly from up-to-date browser and it's available in e-pub e-book format you also again have information about how many copies are owned and how many of those copies are available you have a synopsis of the book that you can read you can expand this synopsis by clicking on the down arrow overdrive tries to recommend similar titles for you if you scroll down the page in some cases you have review excerpts you have title information i'm going to expand that this will give you the publisher so i know that this book is available from harbour collins and so i know that it's only available uh 26 for 26 checkouts that's just something that your patrons won't necessarily know but i know so i'm actually gonna not check this out after all tells you the release date finally there's some digital rights information just tells the patron about copyright so as i said now that i know that this title is available for 26 checkouts i'm not going to waste any of those checkouts on our training session so let me just find another title to actually go through the checkout process for permanent sunset let's try this one um this one it looks like it is uh checked out already so i'm going to go ahead and place a hold on this title when i go to place a hold um it will ask me to enter an email address so that i can get notified when this title is available um because i've used this account before it's already stored my email address but i could change it if i wanted the email notification to go to a different email address i also have the option to say automatically borrow this title when it becomes available if i want it to be checked out to me immediately if i turn this option off i'll get a notice when the book is available for me to check out and then i'll have three days in which to check it out before it moves on to the next person on the whole list so i usually go ahead and your patrons pop up people want to have that automatic borrow option on so i'm going to place a hold on this title and i'll go back to browsing and i want to go ahead and check out a title that's available and let's go ahead and display new ebooks again and we talked a little bit about having to trying to make sure that a book's available in a particular format for a patron if your patron can only handle kindle format ebooks they may at this point want to limit their display to just kindle ebooks um and just to show you so you can get a sense of how many of the titles are available in kindle format we've got 21 000 titles total when i use this filter on the left and say limit to kindle books i can scroll down to the bottom and you can see i've got 17 400 so between three and four thousand books are not available in kindle format but the majority are so let me go ahead and go in here just find a book that's available and simon and shuster is available for one year so i'm not going to be using up one of our checkouts so i'm going to go ahead and borrow this title um it is checked out to me it tells me i still have uh five checkouts remaining for my total of six checkouts and i have the option of going to my checkouts page or returning the title um before we go to the checkouts page i want to do a check out a couple more titles quickly i'm going to go ahead and go back to the main nebraska overdrive libraries page and this time i want to check out an audiobook so i'm going to go ahead and browse one of these audiobook categories so i'm going to say i want audiobook nonfiction and i'm going to do all nonfiction here's a book available on the screen front and center the boy who runs so i'm going to go ahead and view the detailed record page for this device and a couple things that you want to be aware of on the screen for audiobooks this will tell you whether the edition is abridged or unabridged as a rule we try never to purchase abridged audiobooks because most patrons if they find out an audiobook is abridged they're not interested um so sometimes there are titles that our patrons are interested in but we can only get it in a bridged format through overdrive and so that might be a case where we don't purchase a title that you think we would want to purchase but this case it does confirm it's unabridged i want to scroll down though here and i want to take you to the title information for an audiobook this information is sometimes helpful for the patron and it's sometimes helpful for you if you're trying to troubleshoot with a patron one of the thing one of the pieces of information you get under the title information is how long the audiobook is which is information that patrons sometimes want to know it also tells you the number of parts so eight parts so when a patron is downloading a title sometimes they may think that they're missing a part this can confirm and let you see why how many parts should be downloaded if they want the complete book and let me see i've got a couple questions over here to the right one person asks will these slides be available to read later and um yes they will be and also um another question if a patron has a kindle as their e-reader does this mean that they can check out only the kindle format in other words can a patron check out an e-pub e-book for reading on their kindle device um that's a good question and we'll talk about it a little bit more in the session that we have two weeks from now or we'll kind of go through some examples so you can see if they've got what i would call a kindle e-reader like the black and white uh like uh the kindle um paper white they they can only read kindle format books on those kindle e-readers the exception is if they have a kindle fire the kindle of fire is uh i consider it more like a tablet so it's like an ipad they can send kindle fire they can send kindle format of books to their kindle fire but they can also download the overdrive app on their kindle fire and so then they can download both the e-pub e-books and mp3 audiobooks using the overdrive app so the kindle fire is flexible and allows multiple formats if they've got the kindle e-reader then they're limited to the kindle format okay so i'm going to go ahead and borrow this audiobook and uh i can go to checkouts from right here but i also just want to show you the other way you can get to the checkout page um and that is if you go to your patron's account so clicking on the account icon will take you to uh the account options the first screen that you see is the checkout screen and so you'll see the two books that uh we have checked out here and i'm not going to do anything more with these books at during this session because that's what we're going to talk about in two weeks when we actually talk about the process of downloading e-books and audiobooks um you will notice in both these cases because i have not downloaded the books yet i haven't selected a format yet um i still have the option of returning these titles right now um you'll see in the case of the e-book it says download select one format and you'll remember this e-book was available in several formats so you can see i can choose either the kindle format if i have to have the kindle version of the e-book or i can select the epub e-book um once i select one of those formats and download the title then i will no longer be able to return the title from this screen um but again i'll be able to return it from the software i downloaded to and we'll talk about that and give examples next week or two weeks from now other information you can get from the account area of the overdrive site uh it does give you kind of a running count of your checkouts so it tells you and reminds you you can check out six titles you currently have two titles checked out there's a limit of uh three holes that can be placed and there are two titles on hold already it also talks about items added to your wish list and tells you how many of those wish list items are available now so let's go ahead and look at some of those other screens in under my account one is the hold screen so um this is the uh permanent sunset is the title i just put on hold date added 1013 this other title i put on hold about a week ago information that is important on these screens it tells me that auto checkout is on so that means as soon as the book becomes available to me it will be checked out to me uh if i click on that on link i have the option of turning that off if i don't want it automatically checked out to me this also gives a little bit more explicit information about where your patron is in the hold list because this is something that confuses patrons sometimes they'll they'll think they're next in line for the book but they're actually um there's one person ahead of them in the hold list and so this tells me you are next in line for this title so that means i'm number one on the holes list for this other book it says hold position one person ahead of you so this is one person one additional person has a hole on this title ahead of me and that's not the person that hasn't currently checked out if you click on the little question mark it spells that out a little bit further it says total holds five your holds position number two on one copy there is at most one person ahead of you in line for this title so it's currently checked out to patron a patron b is first in line for the whole first in the hold line i'm patron c and i'm second on the hold list so sometimes if your patrons are confused about where they're at coming to the screen and really reading the text and clicking on the little question mark helps spell that out for them uh under options this is where you can come and if they need to edit the email address that notification is going to go to they can do that here there's also a nice option to suspend a hold maybe they know that um they're about to get the whole the whole they're they're tied the they're you know sometime within the next week the book's going to be automatically checked out to them and they know they're too busy they're not going to read they can suspend their hold for from seven to 90 days they have several increments they can choose so that's a nice option if they're trying to manage their reading um they can remove the hold or again they can turn that auto check out on or off so those are options available to them to manage their holds if they come over to lists this is where they can see titles that they've added to their wish list titles they have rated which i didn't really talk about yet and then um if you've got current titles checked out sometimes overdrive will recommend titles for you one thing that's nice and this is something you can offer to your patrons um since patrons can only place three titles on hold at a time um the other thing they can do if there's titles that they're interested in is they can add them to their wish list um in this case i have nine titles added to the wish list and then there's always the option of seeing what titles are available now so maybe they already have three titles on hold but there are other titles they know they're going to want to read at some point and they but they don't want to cancel a hold and put a hold on the new title they can add them through their wish list and then periodically come to the screen and just check to see which of those titles are currently available to check out so that's a way for patrons to add titles to a list to remember books they want to come back to people often ask is there a way that i can uh get a list of all the titles i've checked out there's not always a good way to do that but one thing that i would suggest to people is if they want to keep a track within their account is once they read a book um i'm going to go in here they can add a rating so they can add a certain number of stars if they always add a rating to a book after they read it they'll be able to go back to their list so account lists and then they can see rated titles so so if they always rate every title they read that would be one way to keep a list of all the titles they've read um finally i want to point out settings for their account and this is probably a screen that not a lot of patrons drill their way down to but it does have some important settings this is where a patron can change their own check out defaults for how long a title is going to be checked out as i said if a patron doesn't change their defaults the default check out um if they check out without thinking about it the default check out is 14 days for ebooks and 14 days for audiobooks if they know that they only want to check an audiobook out for seven days they can switch their default to seven days they can also switch their ebook check out default to seven days or 21 days so i know for me i know it always takes me a while so i've got my default set to 21 days for ebooks so that's where the patron can change their own default there's also a maturity levels option and this has actually caused some odd problems that are a little bit hard to troubleshoot um some patrons have come in to this uh screen and they think while they're adults and so they select for some reason they've gotten their settings set to limit their to limit the titles they see to mature adult to mature adult um and then what usually happens is they go ahead and they do a search or browse and they get hardly any titles or no titles at all so they'll come here and they'll say i want to see ebook fiction um horror category and they only get one title and then they'll say i know there's more titles than that then maybe the librarian will log into her account and do a search the same search the same browse and she'll get lots more titles and they'll say why can't i only see this one book um the couple times that's happened um you know when i when i see that happening and they're not getting very many titles uh one thing to do is go check and see if they've got some sort of uh maturity level limit or set um mature adult title is actually basically i think it it's tagged to the erotic literature subject heading and so all they're getting are titles that have that subject heading erotic literature so usually that's not what people are wanting to limit their searches to so once you go back to juvenile to mature adult go back and do your browse for horror titles again and now you've got 275 titles so that's just sort of a tip for troubleshooting if people are getting uh fewer titles than they would expect and other settings we don't have as many problems with you can block mature adult book covers if you want there's a high contrast uh display option that may help people who have visual problems uh and then there's also a dyslexic font that you can turn on that dyslexic font is just on the website itself it doesn't apply to the text of the books per se so those are the other two setting options in the setting screen um i think i don't see any other questions that kind of gets me i think to the end of what i wanted to cover in today's session do you guys have questions uh before we sign off for today's session finally i'll just say in case some of you may have logged on after uh after i did my little introduction spiel if you are uh logged in i should be able to see you if you have additional people attending with you uh that don't show up on the the login uh display that i've got if you've got other people attending that didn't go through the login process just type their name in the question box and send it to me and i'll make sure that uh they also get recorded as attending this session um if you guys don't have any more questions for me that that's all i have uh today um how to access your slides um why don't i go ahead i can send them by email to the people who attended today and then also i will be putting up um the recording for this session on uh our website and i'll send out information when that's available over the nebraska overdrive mailing list um so yeah this recording will be available so that people can watch it who weren't able to attend today any other questions or comments feel free to leave them in the question box let's see i'm just scrolling to make sure i didn't miss any questions i think i've got them all okay um well like i said i'll make these a bit this available the recording in the slides and i hope um if you're interested you can join me in two weeks when we actually pick up from here and actually talk about downloading uh and the software you need to download in different situations but again if you can't attend in two weeks i'll record that session as well and put it up so hope everyone has a great weekend and i will be in touch bye bye