BACKGROUND
The Schertz Public Library began offering e-books and e-audiobooks to our community more than a decade ago. Library customers no longer think of our digital resources as a novelty, but a much-appreciated service. It is a service, however, that comes with some challenges. On the up side, digital content:
- Offers flexibility to our customers. E-books and e-audiobooks are one more way to fit reading into busy lives.
- Provides access to reading materials to people who aren’t able to physically come into the library. From deployed military personnel to children stuck at home with the measles to shut-in elderly persons, reading can still be part of life even when access is limited.
- Makes it easy to update content or provide access to out-of-print content. This is particularly important when providing non-fiction and educational materials.
- Allows libraries with limited space for physical collections to maintain minimum materials per capita levels when they run out of room.
On the down side, digital content:
- Costs far more initially for a library to provide than regular print materials. The average cost of an e-book to libraries is around $60 vs. $26 for print.
- Is difficult for customers to discover without a platform for viewing it and the ability to integrate the titles into regular library catalogs.
- Is proving to be almost impossible to build up into a robust collection over time because publishers are metering the content. Metering is the practice of requiring a library to purchase a copy of a book over and over again because the license only lasts for 26 or 52 check-outs. Other metering models are based on unlimited check-outs for a limited period of time, such as 12 or 24 months. Some publishers allow libraries to purchase titles with a perpetual license, meaning that the library owns the title forever. A perpetual license title can cost more than $100.00, but fewer and fewer titles have perpetual licenses.
In 2017, eleven public libraries in the Dallas area, discouraged by the unfavorable terms of their digital consortium, the high cost of providing digital content, and their inability to build up the number of titles in their digital collections even after significant investment, began looking for a new way to share their digital content with each other. Their idea was to create a system based on the way libraries share their physical collections through interlibrary loan. Each library in the group would own their own content (unlike most consortia which own titles collectively) and let other libraries borrow a title when their own customers weren’t using it. They formed a coordinating committee, partnered with Bibliotheca (formerly known as 3M and one of the largest digital content providers to public libraries), to create a platform that allowed title sharing, and created the interlocal agreement before you. Once the libraries began sharing their content through this digital interlibrary loan system, they all saw dramatic increases in usage and decreases in wait time for their customers. Library customers immediately had access to more than 10 times the number of titles they had previously. Several months later, Bexar County’s Bibliotech library joined the group and the number of titles available to their customers sky-rocketed.
In the last year, the group has grown to about 25 libraries, including our neighbors New Braunfels, Seguin and Boerne. The number of unique titles available to customers is currently more than 60,000. In less than two years, the group collectively had more than a million circulations.
Once a library joins the group, the interlocal agreement is in place until a library dissolves the relationship with written notice, violates the terms and is voted out of the group by the coordinating committee, or the Bibliotheca CloudLibrary cloudlinking program is no longer available.
FISCAL IMPACT
There are no membership fees associated with being part of the agreement. The interlocal agreement does require each participating library to spend a minimum amount per year on content. The requirement is to spend a minimum of $10,000 or 10% of a library’s materials budget, whichever is less, in order to have a robust collection for users. For the Schertz Public Library, this means we must meet an expenditure level of $10,000 per year. We currently spend more than this amount on e-books and e-audiobooks through two other vendors, Overdrive and RBDigital. RBDigital content is licensed to us but doesn't actually belong to us. Usage of that particular resource is low, so we are dropping RBDigital at the end of December and redirecting the funds earmarked for it to CloudLibrary purchases. We will continue to provide access to e-books and e-audiobooks through our Overdrive Lone Star Digital Library (LSDL) consortium until at least 2021 when our current agreement ends, but we may continue to fund both platforms.
You may ask why we would continue funding Overdrive purchases beyond 2021 if the interlibrary loan model of providing e-books seems to work better than the consortium model. First, not all titles are available through every vendor. We purchase print titles from multiple vendors for the same reason. Second, Overdrive is currently the only vendor licensed to provide Kindle format titles to public library users. Older Kindle devices are still popular with our customers at this time. Third, we are a founding member of LSDL and its primary manager. Our withdrawal could severely hamper the ability of the other member libraries to provide access to e-content. We, of course, will choose a course that is best for our customers, but there may be no need to disrupt the operation of a consortium that has operated successfully for a decade. The Dallas-area libraries were hampered by their consortium's terms-of-service, but our own consortium's terms are less restrictive. We have the option of moving our owned content from Overdrive to CloudLibrary in 2021 should it make sense to do so. We also have the option of moving all eligible LSDL consortium holdings to CloudLibrary if all the members agree to move to the platform.
Our main interest in the ability to borrow e-content through the ILA is to expand the number of titles available to our customers. The real draw-back with the LSDL consortium is that it is limited to a finite number of libraries in a specific geographic area. It can't grow any larger. Most of the member libraries are small with extremely limited budgets, so it's unlikely the amount of money available to purchase content will change much over time.
RECOMMENDATION
This Interlocal agreement is advantageous to our customers in that they will have access to far more titles than we can afford to provide on our own. They will also have access to more copies of titles, driving down wait times. Staff recommends adoption of this Resolution authorizing the Public Library Interlocal Agreement for Mutual Access to CloudLibrary Digital Resources.
|