Meeting Minutes for 03/01/2023

Demo Days Volunteers [MLN1 & MLN2]

• Looking for more volunteers to help choose vendors for the August 9th & 10th vendor days. The idea behind the vendor demo day's timing is to get better, fairly solid pricing for 2024 in the summer of 2023 so libraries can build the pricing into their budgets. If there are any academic eContent vendors we could also build the pricing into their budgets that are due in December 2023 for July 2024.   

Vendor Demo Days Volunteers

• Selene Gardner (Englewood)
• Tallie Gray (Grand)
• Leah Morris (Delta)
• Peggy Norris (Louisville)
• Gina Scioscia (Boulder)
• Tracie Seurer (CMU)
• Liz vonTauffkirchen (Pine River)
• Greg Wilson (Adams State)

• Adam asked the group for potential vendors for the Vendor Demo Days 
  • Adam mentioned that we have a few vendors that the former Flatirons consortium members have as they migrate contracts to Marmot will automatically go on the list to see if other libraries want to sign on to these existing contracts.
  •  Someone suggested ComicsPlus and Creativebug
  • Someone suggested Kanopy and LinkedIn Learning
  • Adam asked about the Patron Point marketing platform which we looked at previously. Some members stated they would be interested in another demo.
  • Adam asked about the Washington Post, Consumer Reports, Data Axle, and Ancestry. A good number of members stated they would be interested in reduced pricing with a group purchase. Others were interested in the Washington Post and Ancestry. 
  • Someone suggested Heritage Quest because you can access it at home and use the Ancestry databases.
  • Someone else suggested Newsbank.
  • Adam thinks this is a good list of vendors for the Vendor Days and thanked people for their feedback.  

Action Item: Tammy will get a doodle poll to find a common date and time for the group to meet to start working on choosing vendors for the Vendor Demo days.

OverDrive Banner & Libby Landing Page for Sierra Passwords [MLN1]

• Survey to pick the best wording for the OverDrive banner
• The survey will close on March 8th
• Go live with the banner will be on March 9th
• Libby information landing page needs a mobile-ready site
  • Marmot does not have mobile-ready sites
  • We will not have any information about the Sierra passwords on Libby
• There was some concern about the wording for the banner asking patrons to contact their library. The discussion went in the direction that it would be best to have a link to the support page and suggest that patrons go to their library homepage for more information. 

Action Item: Tammy will send the most popular wording from the survey to OverDrive to have them create a banner that will go live on March 9th. 

Blackstone Audio Renewal [MLN1]

Discussion about a policy 

• The group would like this called guidelines or best practices instead of policy.
• One issue when choosing titles is when a library purchases a large number of copies and we purchase it as a simultaneous use (SU) title this negates what a library has already purchased. It might be best to find a title that is popular but we do not have enough copies to fulfill the holds. Those are the titles we should purchase using this SU method.
• Currently, we have 50 titles so we will also have to discuss that renewal in November as well. Do we keep adding 50 titles or go back to 25 titles? Tammy will share the checkouts for the November 29, 2023 meeting to decide on the renewal for January 2024.
• Another discussion topic: do we try to purchase book 1 the first year and book 2 the next year and so on? Someone responded that it depends on the series. If it is a kind of more episodic mystery that people often read out of order, not purchasing them in order would be okay.  Something to consider is if we can only get one book out of a series, do we purchase that one title? 
• Someone mentioned that children’s titles purchased usually do not circulate well on the adult curated list. Someone asked if the children’s titles could be put on the Kids/Teen pages. 
• Someone asked what process we would consider to propose new titles for the group.
  • The group decided that they would like new titles each year.
  • The group discussed that this list of titles should include a mix of genres.
  • The group discussed having a planning meeting for the June 7th meeting to write up some guidelines.
  •  The group discussed finalizing the guidelines at the August 30 meeting.

Action Item: Tammy will check with our OverDrive rep if the children’s titles purchased through Blackstone Audio can be added to the kid's page.

Update since the meeting: Here is the response from our OverDrive rep, Jane, about how to display Blackstone Audio children’s titles, “We recommend curating a general list of all Blackstone SU to publish on the home page, then separate lists of Juvenile/YA Blackstone content that you would publish in the Kids/Teen page.”

Other Business

• State Report Statistics for OverDrive
  • Someone asked for help with OverDrive statistics for the state annual report
  • Here is the OverDrive Monthly & Yearly Statistics documentation that should help people get those statistics.
  • If you need help, please contact Tammy (tammy-at-marmot.org)

• Advantage OverDrive Automatic Weeding Report 
  • At the December meeting, Lisa shared how she set up her automatic weeding for your Advantage OverDrive account.
  • Here is the recording from the December meeting that shows you how to set up a weeding plan.
  • During the March meeting, Lisa asked people again to consider setting up their weeding plans. Lisa suggested that the best thing you can all do is weed titles that are expired so they do not show up for patrons to place holds on titles that we may not wish to have in our collection. 
  • Lisa added that since she made the recording she investigated the purchasing of the older titles, and has now changed her philosophy and is now weeding titles with holds. This way, they will not get additional holds on those titles.  

The next meeting is on June 7, 2023, at 10:00 a.m.