Meeting Minutes for 08/09/2022

The Palace Project (Valerie ‘KAV’ Kavanaugh, Palace Project)

• Palace Project presentation slides
• Currently, the Palace Project is only available for public libraries. They are investigating working with academic libraries. Unfortunately, they are not working with K-12 schools on their own at this time. They would have to look at Clever for authentication into their student information systems. They are working with public libraries that are part of a district library for both the school and public libraries. 
• Here is the Palace Project Roadmap that is being shaped with input from their library adopters.
• The Palace Project is an eBook and audiobook aggregator. They aggregate all your eBooks and audiobooks in one platform. The Palace app is free to download.
• There is a Palace marketplace for purchasing content with fee-free access.
• The team at the Palace Project provides the hosting of the platform to allow them to make some integrations, implementations, and tech support. The tech support is available 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. (EST). The team provides training for the Palace manager, and the Palace app, as well as providing marketing and promotional resources.
• There is a community hub that is similar to the look and feel of Facebook.
• Loan rules are dictated by the loan rules you have already in place with your content provider. 
• The Palace Project has 16,000+ simultaneous, perpetual, and unlimited use titles, 450,000+ non-English titles, 10,000+ open access titles, and 50,000+ audiobooks. They are currently the only eContent provider or distributor of titles from Amazon Publishing and Audible Publishing sourced directly from the Palace Marketplace. 

Action Item: Tammy will work with Valerie to get the consortium and individual pricing for all the public libraries. This would be pricing for 2023.

Q & A Section

• Q: Will Hoopla be available?
• A: The Palace Project team is in conversations with Hoopla. Palace is waiting on Hoopla to decide if they want to go forward.  
• Q: Does the OverDrive content include access to Kanopy?
• A: No, there is currently no access to Kanopy through Palace Project. 
• Q: Until all Marmot Libraries have implemented PINs, can the pin requirement be turned off by the library?
• A:  Yes, that is certainly possible to do because they have some libraries that do not use pins.  
• Q: May we have a list of the publisher?
• A: Palace Project has over 30 publishers currently and acquiring more that lean into the various lending models. You can use the test user login (provided by email) to go into the Palace marketplace. It will show you the various lending models that you can break down within the facets to get a listing of all the publishers, various languages, loan rules, and pub dates.  
• Q: Are magazines on the roadmap?
• A: Magazines are supported in PDF format but that is not the format for most magazines. They do not have the support to stream magazines through a web viewer just yet. However, they could easily support PDFs. 
• Q: The images are quite small in the app. Is there an option to control the composition from our end?
• A: The user's phone can adjust the size dynamically. We use the native settings of the user's device vs having the library choose one size fits all. 
• Q: Is there a playback speed option for audio?
• A: Playback speed is set as you would for native audio on a device such as 0.75x, 1.0x (normal) 1.25x, 1.50x,  and 2.0x.
• Q: Is there a reading history?
• A: Reading history is not maintained for the users due to privacy issues. Their bookshelves are always synced up between devices when they log in. When a patron returns a title, they do not keep that history. 
• Q: Engineering backward, our discovery layer, Pika, already lists titles from our catalog as well as Overdrive, Hoopla, and Kanopy in search results. If patrons start searching at the library catalog/Pika, is there a way to load the Palace Project titles into our discovery layer/Pika?
• A: Palace Project is currently working with ByWater Solutions with Aspen Discovery on this type of project. The first way is a MARC record endpoint where the records could be harvested through your traditional ILS cataloging process. They are in discussion with other ILS providers talking about direct API integration. They have extended their back end into what they call an open publication distribution system crawlable feed, meaning you can get the entire catalog or collection that is in the Palace app through a simple JSON feed. The JSON feed is well described it has everything you need including the formats, metadata description, classifications, subject, author, publication date, and a link to the actual title. There are several tools you can use to integrate into our discovery system, but a lot is dependent on your vendor if it is a hosted solution, or if you host your own solution. 

Palace Project Discussion

• Ashley addressed the question about using Pika integration for the discovery of Palace Project titles. 
  • Ashley mentioned that it sounds like they have APIs available. 
  • Ashley is envisioning if several libraries went with the Palace Project that the Pika team would have to look into developing an API with Pika for Palace holdings. 
  • Ashley images that this development would replace other integration since it is meant to be an aggregator it would replace the OverDrive and Hoopla API. 
  • Ashley mentioned that having one app would make things easier for patrons but she does not know what things are going to look like in Pika with Palace specific titles. She pointed out that they do not have the magazine integration yet or Kanopy titles. Currently, Pika has the Kanopy titles sideloaded. Plus, the Palace does not have a concrete deal with Hoopla yet.
  • Ashley also wondered how things would look in VuFind because that discovery layer does not have sideloading capabilities like Pika.
  • Ashley pointed out that just because Palace has an API it does not mean it will be easy. All the interactions need to be built out like what the buttons do which is just the tip of the iceberg.
• Cecilia pointed out that we did see a demo last year and they still have work to do. She was looking at their marketplace and finally found two authors that she recognized. She wondered if the Amazon connection is a way for them to manipulate us since they already restrict what we can get from the other vendors. She expressed her concern that we are weakening our power as a consortium when we start going out and piecemealing out our digital budgets to other places. She thinks we need some type of agreement between the libraries on our combined digital library. Cecilia thinks if Palace have great options in their marketplace it would be a lot more attractive.   
• Lisa does see a big issue with academic and school libraries that are part of OverDrive that cannot be a part of the Palace Project. She mentioned that it was a big disconnect that she had not seen before.
• Cecilia also wanted to address their app. She thinks it’s hard to beat Libby. She tried everything mentioned in the chat to increase the size of the covers, but it did not work. However, everything else is showing up much larger on her phone. The speed is an issue as well. If you have to go into the settings to change the speed this is going to turn people away from using the app.  She wants to read something in a friendly app. If the Palace app is not easy to use why would anyone want to switch?
• Tallie mentioned as someone who orders that if they aggregate the titles it would be much easier for ordering.

The next meeting is on September 13th at 1 p.m.