Minutes for 09/08/2015

E-Content Committee Minutes September 8th, 2015

OverDrive, Purchase of holds by member Libraries - Alysa Selby

• Alysa is in the process of buying for the month of September. She has to wait until after a certain date, because she gets a notice that certain titles are expiring. After that is done she and Joyce will take care of the hold list. They will share the list with Jimmy, and see if people’s dollars will bring down the holds. We'll see if it's less of an issue for this month. Right now it looks scary, but Alysa does not know how many dollars that Joyce has to spend. That is all that Alysa has to report. She wanted to thank all those libraries who went shopping.
• Shelly - I think the smaller libraries appreciated someone directing them with the purchases. I think it's a win-win for everybody, until we run out of money.
• Jimmy thinks we are going to keep doing this for a few more months. Alysa or Joyce will send him the list. He will go into the last report of libraries who have spent under their budget. He thinks we might actually reach a point where everyone is on budget or getting ahead, and that will be a different problem. Right now the libraries who he will send a shopping list will be the ones who have spent the least of what they budgeted.

Vacating DCL’s Content Server – Jimmy Thomas

• We have about a thousand titles on the Douglas County Library Adobe content server that they have been sharing with us for years now. Our earliest experiment with Douglas County model were a success at proving how hard it is to do the acquisition portion of Douglas County model. We did not add much to that collection. We started with a few publisher and a few individual authors. In a year or two we did another purchase from McGraw-Hill, and another eBook purchase from eBbooksAreForever. The main point is that buying books directly from publishers is no fun. We got an email from OverDrive asking if we would like to migrate books from other platforms on to OverDrive content server. We are asking that question now and we are inviting comments from this whole group about whether that sound like a good idea, or whether we want to keep these things on a separate content server. There is one other point to make which is that OverDrive has made this offer to migrate all titles for free, if we decide by September 18th. If we decide after that the price will be $2.00 per item. Half of the titles are Gutenberg titles which are already in the OverDrive free collection. We are really only talking about 600 titles. Moving them later at $2.00 a title is an option. Deciding to move them now at no charge is the option that we're pursuing.
• Jimmy asked a number of questions of OverDrive. His answers can be seen in the email titled [E-content] Fwd: Upgrade Your eBooks [by moving them to OverDrive] sent on August 24th. This is time to make comments or ask questions to the group during this meeting, instead of the email thread. We need to make a decision, but Jimmy needs to give OverDrive our decision by September 18th.
• Shelley - Besides the Gutenberg titles, my upstanding was that a number of them were a collaboration with CIPA, the Colorado Independent Publisher Association, is that right correct?
• Jimmy - I don't think we ever actually got into CIPA. The email thread was the most recent count of the titles and publishers. The bigger numbers were with McGraw-Hill, eBooksAreForever, and IPG after that it was 10 to 12 titles per source.
• Shelley - Is there a way to find out what this content is? Do we move it all over automatically, or are we going to weed before we bring everything over?
• Jimmy - Let's hear comments from the group. Comments - Weeding sounds like more trouble than it’s worth since they are relatively new titles. Question - if the titles are on OverDrive server, will we still own them?
• Jimmy -The OverDrive form requested information about the collection and asks for ISBN, author, title and basic bibliographic data along with license terms. We will have to communicate that the use all of them come with perpetual licenses, one copy per user, and those are the license terms we bought them directly from the publisher. If OverDrive cannot honor those license terms, than that will be a stumbling block. What I take at face value for today is that OverDrive will tell us what license terms we’ve got, and they will pursue the same ones. We would have one copy, owned in perpetuity, and check out one copy per one patron.
• Shelley - Pine River agrees. I don't know if we take a vote on it?
• Alysa - I do not mind the migration providing we can keep the licensing we have, and we do address what we are going to do about the local published materials from local authors. Does that go into our future digital repository or can OverDrive even handle those types of titles?
• Jimmy -Actually that question came in from two directions. Alysa asked the question one way, and Yulia asked it a different way. In both cases the point was what can we do with eBooks by local authors? OverDrive had a facility for uploading the eBooks, but it did not work. I sensed from all the members who tried it that it was no good. If OverDrive made it better or usable in the meantime, I do not know. Has anyone on the call tried to do anything with uploading eBooks using OverDrive facility?
• No response.
• Jimmy suggested that we pursue this with OverDrive, and give them our intent to move these with a number of concerns, like what do we do with eBooks by local authors, and see how far we get. Jimmy would not be surprised if OverDrive takes our list and says that we can import the ones that are already in our catalog like McGraw-Hill. It might be just a one for one that are already in the marketplace, and all they have to do is set us up with licenses. When it gets into the odder ones like the independent authors like Clifford Irving. We bought those directly from Clifford's son and loaded them. How we get OverDrive to honor those local authors, Jimmy does not know, but he would not be surprised if OverDrive stumbles when they get to that one.
• For the moment, Jimmy thinks the right thing to do is to say to OverDrive that we intend to move all we can assuming the license are preserved, and ask the question about what we do about local authors. If that tactic sounds okay to everyone, that is what Jimmy will pursue with OverDrive. Now would be a great time to say, I object.
• Liz - Looking at Jimmy's email, she noticed that OverDrive has agreed to waive the $2.00 per title fee. Are there other fees associated that we will be responsible for?
• Jimmy - There better not be. We accept this proposal do this at no charge. If anyone has any second thoughts, or anyone not attending the meeting who might read the minutes and not agree, please let me know. I will not do the formal reply until the deadline of September 18th. We can chat about this at MUG. If we come up with a reason why not, we can deal with that decision.

Total Boox Presentation

• Shelly welcomed Peyton and Tom from Total Boox to the meeting. Here is the video of the presentation - Total Boox Presentation.