Minutes for 11/10/2015

E-Content Committee Meeting 11/10/2015

Board BiblioBoard presentation – Carolyn Morris

• BiblioBoard presentation (video)
• There was a request that Carol comes back to show Biblioboard Creator. Carol gave her contact information, morrisc@bibliolabs.com. Anyone can email her to set-up a time to show Creator.
• Jimmy - Some of what Carolyn talked about was an interesting segue to what we are doing with the titles that were put on the Adobe content server. I think we do want to talk to her more. I think there is a second demo, part-two, where we could see Creator. I think there were a couple things that people were eager to see, so we should book another time with Carolyn. In the meantime, I will get her information, so she can say something about pricing to you individually, or us as a consortium.

Progress report on transfer of titles from ACS to OverDrive. – Jimmy

• This is a progress report on the transfer files from ACS to OverDrive. Jimmy shared a summary of what actually went on to the content server. 415 Gutenberg titles went into their own open access area, they are not even in the Adobe Content Server. OverDrive acknowledge that the 176 IPG, 76 Lemer, 6 Smashwords and 29 UC Press, could be loaded as ePubs, or set our ownership for these titles. One way or the other, they did acknowledge that those source of records could be migrated with no problems. The providers (Akashic, Capstone Press, Clifford Irving, D.M. Yourtee, eBooksAreForever, ETS, Gareth Stevens, John Morris, Kathleen Arthur and McGraw-Hill) have not responded to the initial deadline.
• Jimmy contacted August from eBooksAreForever, and they are willing to cooperate. All OverDrive has to do is open up the channel for him to do that. This is not close to being done. There is no sign of progress with McGraw-Hill. There are dozens of titles that OverDrive is not readily accepting. Jimmy is not sure yet what to do about that, but to lean on Andrew at OverDrive, and say how can we help you get in touch with these people?
• Our final fallback position is to put the ePubs that we purchased on a server somewhere, until we have a place to put them. One of the questions that Jimmy has for Biblioboard might be if we cannot move all these to OverDrive, can we move any of them to Biblioboard? Would that actually be a solution for us? Jimmy just wanted people to know where we are in the process with OverDrive. He wanted them to acknowledge that they can get these titles in to our OverDrive collection as close to the beginning of next year as possible. This gives us another month and a half, counting the holidays, to get these things off of the content server, before Douglas County shuts it down. My segue to topic number three with Alysa is of the independent authors, Kathleen Authur, Hariett Freiberger, D.M. Yourtree, John Morris, and Clifford Irving, does what Alysa saw in testing uploading local content to OverDrive qualify for what we want do with a handful of titles that we purchased from independent authors? Is OverDrive even compatible with those or not, I am going to defer to Alysa to say something about that. Questions or Comments?
• Shelly - What I am hearing is that you are thinking that OverDrive has not reached out properly to all these other authors, as witnessed by what you did with eBooksAreForever? Where OverDrive is saying that it is not their fault that it is these other author's fault for not getting back to them.
• Jimmy - For all I know OverDrive sent an email to some info@ebookareforever.com, and it did not get to August. It is a small company, so that seems unlikely. I could not go back to the vendor contact that we worked with, when we made the purchases, and say you need to tell OverDrive it is okay to transfer these. There is some follow-up nagging that I can do at least for the ones that we have the biggest quantity purchased like McGraw-Hill. If someone wants to let me know which ones that are most urgent, because they had the most activity, then you could do that offline by email.
• Shelley - In so far as these individual eBooks are concerned would that be something that we could included in our digital archive project or repository?
• Jimmy - Is that possible where eBooks and digital objects overlap, and should not overlap is not clear yet. We could probably park a lot of these in the digital archives. It's not oriented towards eBooks, but that's a fine question. I do not know the answer today.

Results of experiment with OverDrive local content upload. – Alysa

• Alysa is going to demonstrate how to add local content to OverDrive. These feature has real value now that we are going to be vacating the Adobe Content Server. Demonstration on how to load local content to OverDrive (video).
• Alysa - One small problem with adding local content to OverDrive is adding PDFs. The PDF is downloaded to a computer. We do not get any on screen viewing, we do not have any kind of a reader that will handle a PDF, or an ePub. With these local materials feels like it is really important that we move to ePUB. Does something like Self-e from Biblioboard solve that problem for us? This way we do not need to be experts at converting PDFs to ePubs. That is where I am curious that Self-e might be a better option than OverDrive.
• Shelley - If we do decide to use our digital repository in some way to upload eBooks and we have local content available from OverDrive, the only advantage to Biblioboard is this cooperation that they set up between Library Journal and eBooks.
• Alysa - Our staff are so well trained with OverDrive. Running everything through OverDrive makes troubleshooting easier for staff. When it is easy for staff, then patrons are successful. When you add a whole other platform like Biblioboard, you have another learning curve to go through. I look at Biblioboard, especially the Self-e thing, and I think it really is incumbent that libraries promote titles that not everybody gets to see, that we endorse. I really like that concept as a model going forward for libraries. There is a part of me that is very excited about what Biblioboard is doing, but it is another app, it is another platform, it is another interface that we have to negotiate. We have to ask ourselves is that reasonable?

OverDrive patron purchase enhancement (below). -Jimmy

• Jimmy - I ran into David Farnan from Boulder Public Library at Cal. He said that he was talking with 3M and OverDrive about enabling a patron purchase option where the patron would purchase an eBook donated to the library, and get their name put at the head of the hold queues, so the first checkout goes to the patron who funded the book. Subsequent checkouts go to all their other patrons after that. This is not an original idea, we talking about things like this for about 10 years. To do this today with OverDrive and Pika would take some code on OverDrive's part and some code on our part in Pika to make something like this to come into existence. I do not know that this is the only or the best enhancement idea. Honestly, we have not taken enhancement suggestions to OverDrive since the APIs. I wanted to share this idea. It sounded like a good idea. Maybe it is something that is worth our attention at this time. Actually we have three things on the table today, between this enhancement suggestion, what do we want to do with Biblioboard, and what do we want to do with OverDrive local content? Our next step is to articulate this to OverDrive. I have written to our rep, Meghan Volchko, but have not heard anything. At this point, I just wanted to poll people, and ask if this is a good idea? Is this worth pushing OverDrive, or is there something completely different that we should be focusing our efforts?
• Joyce - How would this exactly work? They would be showed books that are available to be purchased through OverDrive in the Marmot online catalog? Would it be things we do not already own? I am confused about how they would out that they have the possibility to buy those eBooks, and how to they have access to do it.
• Jimmy - In OverDrive today there is an option to expose the entire Marketplace to patrons, or not.
• Shelley - We had that option in ACDC. There was some people who really did not like certain aspects of the feature.
• Jimmy - I could guess that Marketplace is a big catalog, and the subset we have at Marmot or ACDC, would be such a subset for patrons to see would be about 5% of the collection that they can actually check out, and the rest they could buy that is easily a concern.
• Jimmy - Joyce, for patrons to see what they could buy for the libraries, they would have to have visibility into that entire Marketplace. How to make that searchable, there are a lot of details which have not been thought through. We would have to think about that.
• Shelley - I would love to see if we could do one aspect of it. We could take care of some of our holds, so we could just on allow people to take care of all those holds, and then we can still go forward with ordering what we wanted. If someone gets on and sees that there are these different holds, they have this option to buy one for the library, as long as we can read it first. They will be given library pricing for this item instead of what they are used to as personal items.
• Jimmy - Which is another obstacle. Would you like to buy this for yourself for $10, or for the library at $60 or $95 bucks, and then donated to the library?
• Action Item: Shelly will talk with Jimmy and Tammy and get the conversation organized for us to continue it. She will check to see if Carolyn from Biblioboard wants to come back in December or January, and finish up her presentation.

Comments on opening up Marketplace for patrons to purchase items for libraries:

• Gail - I do not remember why we didn't like it. Today, it sounds worth looking at.
• Genevieve- Pitkin is willing to play with the idea of opening up the Marketplace as a lot of our purchases are patron driven.
• Alysa - Willing to look at it again.
• Jennifer & Sharlene - We would like to learn more about this possibility.
• Jimmy - Looks like most of these agenda items are just part one. We will need to talk about these more in our next meeting.