SILLVR: Streaming Interlibrary Loan Video Resources Workshop

Heather Crozier OK, Tasha has started recording, so I think I think we are ready to give us a start. Thank you all for coming. I'm Heather Crozier. I'm the co-chair of ERCI, Brandon Walker, my fellow co-chair. He is here. We are really delighted to have the people here to talk to us about SILLVR today. So I'm going to let them take over and start presenting and handle their introductions so we know everybody who's talking and yay - we're very excited.

 

Sommer Browning Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. Good morning, good afternoon. I don't know where everybody is, but we we hope you're doing well during this very difficult time that just seems to keep getting difficult, more difficult. But we are grateful and so happy to talk to you about a project that we're very excited about: SILLVR, so streaming interlibrary loan video resources. My name is Sommer Browning and I'm the associate director of technical services at Auraria Library. I am presenting today with Katie DiVittorio, head of Collections Strategies at Auraria and Philip Gaddis, who is guiding our PowerPoint here. He's the ILL and acquisitions manager at Auraria and Rose Nelson, the assistant director at the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries. Next slide, please, Philip. So a little background here. Auraria library is the library for the Community College of Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver and University of Colorado, Denver, we're pretty unique in that regard. All three of these schools use the library and they're all located on the same downtown campus in Denver. In the late 60s, a bond measure was passed by the majority of Denver citizens, which forced the relocation of hundreds of Latinx peoples homes and businesses to create this campus. And we just mentioned that to acknowledge their history and their involuntary sacrifice. Auraria is unique also in Colorado in that we're the most diverse campus in the state, diverse in just about every way you can imagine. The majority of our students are nontraditional. They're commuters, they're first generation. We have a high population of veterans, international students and undocumented students. Two of the institutions we serve are designated Hispanic serving institutions by the federal government and the University of Colorado Denver is approaching that status and we support a wide curriculum, everything from students earning their certificates in dental hygiene to students studying for a PhD in civil engineering. 90 percent of our six- our three point six million dollar learning materials budget is spent on electronic resources. Next slide, please. Before we go into the details, we need to introduce our valued partner in this SILLVR project, the Colorado Alliance of Research Library. So this is a photo here of George McGavick, Rose Nelson and Beth Denker, and they're integral to the success of SILLVR. The Colorado Alliance is a consortium founded in 1974 that negotiates contracts for e-resources for its 16 member libraries, as well as provides many other services, professional development and ERM- electronic resource management- software called Gold Rush, as well as Prospector, which is our regional library to library borrowing and lending service. Over 50 libraries from all over the state and the University of Wyoming take part in Prospector. And Prospector is enormous. It has over 33 million items in its union catalog and it is basically the infrastructure of SILLVR. And you'll hear more about this later. Next slide, please. So SILLVR started long, long ago in a galaxy not too far away and in 2017, one of our many library reorganizations- we do that just every six months to keep people on their toes, it seems- but in this particular reorg, we moved interlibrary loan into what was then known as the acquisitions department, and so we had new staff working on interlibrary loan and adding that acquisitions perspective, and they started asking questions about why certain materials were lendable and others were not. They started digging into ILL permissions in our licenses. They were already very familiar with the increasing spend at our library on streaming video. And we were reading about the prevalence of using streaming video to teach. So it felt very natural to start asking ourselves if students and faculty would find it useful at all to use interlibrary loan for streaming videos. Slide, please. But in addition to what our faculty and students might need and use, we thought about larger concepts and ideas. We thought about what ILL fundamentally is and what access to scholarly materials means to the big picture of what libraries do. What does a library-library borrowing do to level the playing field of access to knowledge? What does ILL and resource sharing mean for digital inclusion initiatives? And we asked ourselves about questions about technology and resource sharing. And just because a esource changes its medium, a streaming video rather than a DVD, for instance, that should not mean that we lose our ability to share that content. Next slide. So with all these questions and ideas in mind, we created a survey that we posted to several library listservs and asked questions like, "if your users could borrow streaming video, would they? How often might they use it? How much do you spend on streaming video?" And our intention here was to see if other academic libraries were having the same experience with these resources as we were and we saw that they were. They were spending more on streaming video and they told us very clearly that they thought their patrons would be interested in buying and borrowing streaming video this way. So to us, that was a potential need. Slide, please. After this survey, we we talked we started getting the word out and we talked to as many people and organizations as we could trying to find vendor partners who might be interested. We shared the survey data with with librarians all over the country- basically, anyone. We put together are our ideas, which were in their infancy at that point- but at least we had this really cool name, SILLVR, which Phillip coined- and we presented at conferences all over Charleston. We we pitched the idea to OCLC and we got two vendors on board, Films on Demand and Swank. And at the same time we also secured this vital partnership with the Alliance. Slide, please. So overall, we thought this would be the hardest part, but we were pleasantly surprised by the reaction streaming video vendors had to this idea. Basically, no one outright laughed at us. In fact, they did the opposite andwere very welcoming and Swank and FOD were almost in immediately 100 percent. So the pitch we had was twofold. One was money and one was values. Very American pitch here. The first we presented this pilot as an opportunity for them to increase their sales. And we had evidence because not too long before this pilot, a license was brokered between Springer and the Alliance that allowed Springer e-books to be loaned to libraries in our consortium. And after a period of lending, these libraries saw how these e-books were used by their patrons and purchased their own subscriptions to Springer. So the key here is something George, the director of the Alliance, calls the nuisance factor is that their patrons were using the e-books so heavily that it was an obstacle for them to wait for the ILL process to happen. That was one, two, three, one to three days, just too long. And the second argument related to how ILL supports digital inclusion and equity in access to the communities we serve. And we know that most vendors care about these things and we certainly know that it is a value that all libraries share. So we pitched it that that SILLVR can help fill that gap in resources between libraries that can afford to spend money on on these important educational videos and those that can't. Next slide, please. So this is a timeline here. So after our internal discussions that began in April of 2018, we actually applied for an IMLS grant for a ton of money and did not get it. We administered that survey. We secured the Alliance partnership. We wooed our vendors into the pilot. We worked hard to create workflows for the process, did lots of testing and a full year and nine months later, we launched this one year long pilot. So in January, 2020. And I'll end here, and I think Rose is next to add some more details.

 

Rose Nelson Sorry, I couldn't find the mute button- unmute button. So, yes, I'll go ahead and take off where Sommer or start where Sommer took off. So I'm the INN-Reach coordinator at Prospector System, and I think we're real similar to OhioLINK in that we're a union catalog and we have- so the Alliance is... Sommer gave a great background of the Alliance. So we have 16 member libraries. But really what the Alliance is does is we offer these other types of projects and Prospector happens to be one of them. And so, in fact, right now we're at 50 plus libraries, but we're actually growing. We just took in the statewide resource sharing system. So we're adding a bunch of rural and smaller libraries. So in terms of the equity that Sommer mentioned, I think this is going to be really a nice way to bridge the gap to a lot of our areas in Colorado that would never be able to afford this. And so that we're actually in the process of adding all those libraries right now. And prosector was originally it's been around for over 20 years now. So it was originally developed in 1999 for our member libraries. And then, you know, as we've grown throughout the years and our we the system is really discovery, requesting discovery and requesting. And so as Sommer had mentioned, you know, we have 14 million bib records in over 33 million items. We also have a peer connection with the MOBIUS, with the MOBIUS INN-Reach system out of Missouri. And so we have a few other and they actually have a couple of other states that are involved, Iowa, a few libraries from Iowa and also Oklahoma and Texas. And so we've and we've had that established since 2014. The pilot will just be the Prospector libraries, though. And so it's a pretty big system. We have about a half a million fulfillments during covid. You know, that number has probably dropped by half. And so we haven't really recovered from that yet with all of the, you know, limitations still in place at libraries. And then we in terms of our policy for, you know, what people what libraries decide to lend and Prospector or contribute, we say contribute all your records. There really aren't any stipulations on what can be contributed. We really emphasize the discovery piece. So even those things that are not lendable, we encourage libraries to contribute because some people would be willing to like maybe drive to that library to view something. Also, we have patrons, which I'm sure is the same case in Ohio where they live, maybe in different area. They live and work in different areas. And so it would make sense that they have multiple library cards. And so that's always great if they can just use Prospector as discovery and see all of the different holdings from their different libraries, you can go to the next slide. OK, and so I'll talk a little bit about Swank motion pictures, so they are participating in the trial for year one and two, and Swank has the more popular content. And so there are some added restrictions on that. And one of them was that we can only lend those to academic libraries. So that just really includes our community colleges and obviously all the four year colleges, but none of the public libraries. And also, when we started with Swank, we had about a dozen subscriptions in in Prospector or among the member libraries. And they actually asked us to you know, we had a kind of a minimum dollar amount of $40k that we had to reach in order to do the pilot. And so we actually went beyond that. And I think part of the reason for this is that once those Swank records were in Prospector, we were able to get more lenders. And one of the big lenders I know was UC Boulder. Unfortunately, right now, UC Boulder is not lending Swank because they're they're actually out of Prospector temporarily due to some staffing shortages, shortages due to covid. So I hope we hope that they'll we'll be you know, there are definitely returning to Prospector. But right now and we've seen this actually throughout the last year, some libraries, you know, have had to leave Prospector temporarily. I know we have another one, UCCS, which is part of the CU system, the University of Colorado system, and they're the there out of Colorado Springs. And so they're also right now not in Prospector. So and then the other restrictions I should mention on on Swank is that it does not allow public performance rights. But before I go on, I did want to mention that we as I mentioned, that, you know, we they required us to spend 40000. But I think we actually went above and beyond that because of yeah, as I mentioned, the additional libraries that were willing to lend their Swank videos. And and you can see the lenders here on screen, they tend to be the bigger academic libraries. Next slide, please. And this is the Swank portal, and so this is how Swank works, and I know Philip will probably go into more detail about this, but basically when we first set up Swank, if a library already had subscriptions to Swank, they already had this Swank portal for those libraries, those academics that didn't have Swank, they went ahead and set up portals for them. And so the system is a little bit different in that the lenders have to request the URL from the from the from Swank and then that then they have to pull the you the video from their portal. And so basically I think how this works is that the lending library will let the the borrowing library know that they have a request for Swank and then that borrowing library can go into their Swank portal and pull that video or create a link to the video and then the they have 21 days to view it, I believe. And and there is no renewals. Next slide, please. So Films on Demand was the second partner in our first year of the pilot, and unfortunately we were only they didn't allow us to do a second year and into the pilot, it was over 35000 videos. And most of these are the educational documentaries, things like that nature. We had four lending libraries. Again, you can see in our area, the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Wyoming, and then Colorado Mesa, which is a library that's on the western slope there in Grand Junction, actually. And there are a little bit smaller. And the nice thing about Films on Demand was that they allowed us to be able to lend these to everyone through Prospector, all patron types, which is really actually made our job a little bit easier because people don't get confused by the discovery piece of it. Whereas with Swank, we had to, you know, have this text saying this is only available for academic library patrons. So it just made it easier to work with. And also in this one, I should have mentioned, Swank didn't include public performance rights, but Films on Demand did include that. And so maybe this will be something we can talk to Films on Demand in, you know, future years. We're hoping that it might be a possibility down the road to, you know, and maybe once they start seeing that we're working with other vendors and it's all it actually turns into more sales oftentimes for them, they'll reconsider. So we're hoping. Next slide, please. And this is the Films on Demand token generator, so this is really nice. They actually created this token generator for this project. And so basically the lending library creates this URL that that generates the token, which is basically a URL that is passed on to the borrowing library. And then from the borrowing library, they pass it on to their patron via email. And then what's really nice, I think, about these streaming videos is that you don't have to think about, you know, when is that being checked back in or where is it? You know, it just disappears. So nobody I mean, just like an e-resource, which is really nice, you don't have to track these things down. The other thing I should mention, we we actually do have the library lenders do the you know, the lending library checks the item out and then right back in. And we do the same thing with our Springer e-books that were mentioned that are lendable and that's so that we can get the statistic in our INN-Reach system and in our, you know, people's local systems, because these as you can see, they're not tied. There's not like this seamless connection between our vendors and the innovative software. We have to actually do kind of workarounds for this. But that way we can get the statistics on what has been lent. And obviously there's also statistics generated from both the vendors too. Next slide, please. And so in this year two, we've been in talks right now with Alexander Street and so this is really exciting. We're going to have a pilot that starting April 1st. So just in like a couple of weeks, it's going to be about 1500 educational films with ILL permissions. And I actually did take a look at those today. And they're just on all different types of educational, legal K-12, just lots of different topics that are included in that set. And it's really great that they're letting us lend it to all libraries in Prospector, it makes it so much easier, as I mentioned, and we're still determining who the lenders will be, obviously Auraria, but we'll kind of take a look at what other libraries would want to do this in the Alliance. The nice thing is, is that libraries are usually really happy to do this and it doesn't seem to create too much extra work. And I'm really excited because this is something else, again, that we'll be able to offer to all our libraries, those libraries, the smaller rural libraries included that are joining Prospector now. And with this model, they don't have the kind of like fancy token generator. So it'll probably look a lot more like the Swank model. I don't think we've actually the vendor has put in place something quite yet. I think we're still working out those details. But it won't be a seamless seamless is just a URL that you can forward on. And then in this pilot, they also didn't require us to raise any additional funds. So, yeah, we're excited to get started with this one and we'll see how it goes. So and I think I'm turning it over now to Phillip to talk a little bit more about the process.

 

Phillip Gaddis Yes. So in order to make our records discoverable and requestable in Prospector- excuse me- we had to make a few initial changes, including changing the item type, which you can see highlighted there. And we also added key words from SILLVR in the searchable fields of these records and also added either Swank streaming video or FOD streaming video to the barcode field. So that would make these easier to identify on the paging slips once they were requested. And because of the limitation on Swank videos, we also added a note on those explaining that they were only requestable by academic libraries. And we came up with the workflow. This is just a basic overview of it here, where our patron locates the video in Prospector. They a place an item request on the item through Prospector, and then the lending library would receive a paging slip. A lending library would then generate the URL depending on the the vendor, it would either be through the token generator, through Films on Demand or emailing Swank to get them to put the video into the borrowing library's portal. And Swank would also then email the lending library a URL directly to the video so we could supply that to the patron. So the patron didn't have to go into the portal but anybody who did go into the borrowing library's portal would see the video there. And so in in essence, the entire borrowing library was borrowing this video for the duration of the loan because it would just be available through the through their portal. So once we had the URL, we emailed that to the borrowing library. The borrowing library would then they would have the contact information for their patron. We would just get the patrons name and their patron patron no through the back end of the system. And then the borrowing library would be responsible for contacting the patron, telling them, giving them the information. And then the patron would have twenty one days from the time that the URL was generated to view the video. After twenty one days, it would just automatically expire and if the patrons still needed it, they would just have to go through the process and request it over again. Right, and now I'd like to give you just a little bit of a live demonstration here of Prospector and the Films on Demand token generator, and let's see if I can... OK, do you see the Prospector screen here? All right, so as I mentioned before, we had added the key word of SILLVR to all of our requestborrowrrowrrowle streaming video items, and right now, because we have libraries that are in different states are participating in Prospector, you're going to see a lot of the SILLVR items come up with this "no copies currently available," but the ones that are available, you would see a request button. This would work just like any other item that you would request. If you click on the link, it would take you to a place where you choose your library. And then you submit the information, save my information, you just place your request just like that, and then it'll generate a page and slip over to the lending library. The demonstration works a little bit better if we do a known item search, so this is one of the Swank videos. If you just search for it without the word SILLVR, you see, you get a lot of different options here. And some of these come up as a DVD versus streaming video. But if you do throw in the key word of SILLVR. That narrows it down nicely. You can just request to see here it is a streaming video. So that is how Prospector works, it's fairly straightforward works, just like basically any other catalog system. With Films on Demand and, you know, as Rose mentioned, they're not participating in year two, but hopefully they're going to come back for year three. But if you look up their items. And I usually just use Hawaii as my... Films on Demand breaks their videos down into segments, and so it will say segment next to there, but if we're looking for a whole title on the title here and then every title will have an item number. Well, down here. In just a moment, we'll show you. I hear so in order to generate a URL for any FOD item, you would just have to copy their item number into this token generator that they created and their admin portal. Then you click on Generate a Token. OK, they obviously have just deactivated this, but normally what it would do were they would generate a new URL and it would also give you the expiration date. And then there was a copy button that you could just copy that information and paste it directly into an email. So sorry about the error there, but that is it's actually not that unexpected since they're not participating in year two. I'm going to go back to. Back to our PowerPoint. And this is an example of what the paging slip would look like, as you can see, has the title and in the barcode field here, we added the Swank streaming video, as I mentioned earlier, that just helps us at a glance identify which which vendor this had come from and then which process we'd have to follow to get the URL. And then an example of the kind of email that we would then send, we would the lending library would send an email to the borrowing library, who would then copy this information into an email to their patron. Title, patron's name, URL, expiration date and time. I'm going to hand it over to Katie to...

 

Katie DiVittorio Thanks Phillip. With our vendor partners, we created an MOU, that they signed and we had some specific terms that was important to us. One, that the lending length was twenty one days. So that followed the same model we currently had for other content in Prospector for DVDs. We also decided that renewals would not be granted. That was a more complicated process that we also felt like the twenty one days was long enough and it was important to us that lending libraries maintain access. So just like if you were lending a e-journal or an e-book, the lending library kept access at the same time that the bar and library had access. So this would be different than if you were lending a DVD. Next slide. So when we started the pilot, we did expect some challenges. I actually think they were not as bad as maybe we thought they might be. So some of the things we saw sharing software was designed for the most part decades ago to lend physical items and not electronic. So we're having to create workarounds to adapt to this. One example is when patrons submit a request in Prospector, even though there is no physical location, they're going to be picking up the streaming video. They still have to put in a physical location. So it doesn't always make sense. And then each vendor has to create their own process. It's not uniform. So Swank is doing their own thing, Films on Demand did their own thing, Alexander Street is doing their own thing. So that definitely has been a challenge that is not uniform at this time. And then we have not heard about any specific complaints. At least I have not. I don't think it's not been very vocal, but we do understand that there could be connectivity issues in rural areas. I think we may maybe hear more about it this next year since we are having this with libraries which are very rural, join into Prospector. And it is a slower process. It's a mediated process, requires time with the Swank. So those were some challenges. One other thing that occurred that- it was resolved- was Denver Public Library uses a different system, they these Polaris and they had some issues with their patrons getting cancelation notices. Well, actual request went through. They were able to fix that but that seemed like it was some kind of challenge between Polaris and Oncor. So, like the different systems, just not playing nice for a while. But they were able to do some tweaking and fix that. Next slide. So statistics for year one and now two. At the very beginning, we saw lots and lots of use. So like between January and March 2020, it was probably almost half of our use. And then the pandemic hit and Prospector had to be shut down for a while and not all libraries came back. So we have not seen the increase in use that we initially saw at the very beginning of the pilot. Again, I think the majority of tech within Prospector is print. I think patrons, you know, haven't gotten used to going back and using Prospector because of the shut down. But so far, for year one, it's about 700 videos. We did see that the majority was coming from public libraries. So there definitely is a demand from public libraries. About 90 percent are only lent once. So we don't see a ton of re requesting. In year one, there were twenty six new libraries that were able to experience Swank and Films on Demand that didn't have it otherwise. And we also saw new subscriptions. So up front, Swank did get at least forty thousand dollars of new subscriptions. But as the pilot went on, more and more libraries either wanted to be a lender or saw usage from their patrons and added additional subscriptions and Films on Demand also got two additional subscriptions to their content. So both by participating in this pilot got additional sales. Next slide. So just to kind of recap, the the vendors and every vendor we talked to was great. I think our SILLVR group definitely went in with the expectation that everybody was going to shut us down and say there's no way. And it was just such a pleasant surprise with the streaming video vendors how they were like so excited and understood the values. And and we actually had more vendors that wanted to participate. I will say, like Sage streaming video was absolutely ready to also be a partner. There were just not enough subscriptions among the Alliance libraries to let it be a successful pilot and they wanted more money than we were willing to spend. With Swank, again, like we didn't have that many subscriptions and among the Alliance libraries, we felt $40,000 was reasonable. Unfortunately, Sage, it was just too much. So that is another potential partner. If people are looking at doing a pilot like this is Sage, if you already have a subscription, you have money to add new subscriptions. So yes, Swank is continuing. Films on Demand, there were a couple of things that happened that has put them on hold. They changed management on their side of who was working with us on this pilot. And I think that that definitely changed it, like the person we were working with before, very supportive. I'm not saying that the new person isn't supportive, but I think they have other priorities. They want to go in a different direction. Another piece was Films on Demand, in the year one, had let us loan everything and I think they finally discovered they actually didn't have the permissions, ILL permissions to be lending everything. And so on their side, they need to do an analysis of what they can actually lend to like public libraries. And that's what Alexander Street has done. So like with Alexander Street, which is joining in just a couple of weeks, they did an analysis of which live like which of their content they can lend, and it's a subset. So I'm very hopeful that Films on Demand will come back. I think we need more libraries to encourage them. That was another thing we said. They said they didn't hear enough from other libraries around the country of interest. So I think we need some combined pressure of like, yes, there is interest in this. It's important. But all of them were amazing to work with. I mean, everybody is all the vendors have been exciting. We talk to some other smaller vendors, too, like independent ones. And some of the challenges with those ones was they just didn't have the infrastructure to create their own system. So it's like these bigger ones. They have the staffing or the programing, the people to to do this work. So we would love to have some of those smaller vendors participate. But we understand that their their infrastructure is just maybe just let them. Next slide. So we really, really do want other consortia, other libraries to do pilots or do projects like SILLVR, we recommend look at your streaming video collections that you currently have. You know, consider your platforms like we use Prospector. That's worked really well for us. We'll let you do the same type of process and then talk to your streaming video vendors and ask and keep asking and keep bugging them. Even if they say no, just keep trying. You'll get there. And then working with the other consortial partners. The Colorado Alliance has been absolutely amazing to work with. George, Beth and Rose are fabulous. I love working with them. And then also, I like to say really, really encourage initiatives that your staff are passionate about. I was thinking if I had other supervisors or bosses, probably almost every single one would have been like, don't bother, don't try this. It's not going to go anywhere. But Sommer, who's my supervisor, was like, "yes, let's try it." So you never know. Even if it seems like it's unlikely it will go anywhere- you never know. It could happen. So really encourage the projects that your staff are passionate about. Next slide. And that's it, we have an article, you can read it at Collaborative Librarianship, it's open access. We are all on Twitter, but we are not very active and we are happy to answer any questions. Now, Sommer did have to run out a little bit early. But Philip Rose and I should be here still to answer your questions.

 

Heather Crozier Great, thank you. Let me scroll back up, because I know we had a good one earlier in the chat, but you did kind of touch on. Derek had asked about "do you have any hard data that shows an increase or a shifting of funds towards the purchase of videos from vendors that encourage ILL usage?"

 

Katie DiVittorio Yeah, so, I mean, we have the Springer ebook one that happened several years ago is kind of like the concrete example we were able to provide to our streaming video vendors to to show that example. And now now we do have more examples that both Swank and Films on Demand got increased sales because of participating in this pilots. Yeah, for sure.

 

Heather Crozier Yes, I think that would be very convincing. Lorraine had asked about "how do you inform the requester that they need to add SILLVR in?" Rose had addressed that. You do have some tutorials and we all know about the limited customization techniques and... Oh, yeah, "how is usage calculated for the lending library subscription? Does the streaming content just show the one used for the loan or does it show real time use, like when we're looking at our stats?"

 

Phillip Gaddis I don't think that the lending. Sorry, Katie, if you don't mind. I was just gonna say, I don't think the lending library has usage, because even in Films on Demand, the token generator would have created a link directly to the video, so they would have calculated their use based on the tokens being accessed, not necessarily the lending library subscription, if that makes sense.

 

Heather Crozier Yeah, that makes sense to me.

 

Phillip Gaddis And then with Swank, they would have put the video into the borrowing library's portal. So, again, the lending library wouldn't actually be generating any usage outside of whatever their own patrons are doing. So in both cases, like we kept track of the requests on our end and then the vendor primarily would be the one to gather the usage data from their URLs or from their tokens.

 

Rose Nelson I was just also going to mention for the INN-Reach system, one way that I've been able to track it is through these tidal reports. So if you know your INN-Reach coordinator, all of the INN-Reach sites have access to their these these detailed reports that are really nice. And basically what I would do is just like sort by a particular I'm trying to remember a column which would indicate it's a streaming video, and then I'm able to see, you know, who the only information that stripped that's actually good, that is stripped is the patron, any kind of patron details. But you could see down to like the pick up location of of what was requested and then obviously the lending library, and those I prepared and would send to Katie or Phillip to show those statistics. And the one thing I'll say about stats, though, is they never line up perfectly. So far, so good you. Yes. You know, Inn-Reach we have these stats, but they're not going to be exactly the same as what you pull from, you know, Films on Demand or Swank or even maybe the local system.

 

Heather Crozier OK, yeah. Thank you. So this is what I wanted to ask to Mark. Mark from Wooster asks, "Have you approached Canopy? And if so, what was their response?"

 

Katie DiVittorio Yes, but I'll say we approached them reluctantly. We didn't really, really pursue them as a partner for this because their acquisition model is already so problematic. So we talked to them maybe once or twice. And I can't even they maybe had a little bit of interest, but I actually think it was on our side that we didn't have any interest because of their acquisition model. That doesn't mean somebody else shouldn't pursue them. I think that would be great. I'm just not sure that, yeah, it's the right fit for us this time.

 

Heather Crozier I would love to be able to do an ILL of a video, of a Kanopy video, for the faculty member to preview and actually watch before we fork over that money. So, yeah. Drew: "among the challenges listed, I was wondering if SILLVR experienced any authentication issue since each vendor had to create their own ILL URL process?" Yes, that is a good question.

 

Phillip Gaddis Not that I'm aware of at all. As far as as far as we've heard, the links worked, the URLs were all fine. We never had any bad patron feedback about that side of it at all.

 

Heather Crozier Awesome.

 

Phillip Gaddis It was great. Yeah.

 

Heather Crozier Oh, yes, and Lorraine also points out, "the public libraries often have canopy accounts, so they may not be as concerned." Yeah.

 

Brandon Walker I have a question about some of the lending data actually, if you don't mind? Was noting that you'd said something like, what, 700 something loans in a year and 95 percent of those were to public libraries?

 

Phillip Gaddis Correct.

 

Brandon Walker How many academic libraries are in Prospector?

 

Phillip Gaddis I think around 15 or 16, is that correct? Rose?

 

Brandon Walker The reason I ask is because we wanted to talk to you, obviously, to find out about your experiences, but, you know, it's also something that's very interesting to us in OhioLINK, and OhioLINK of course is 88 academic libraries. And while we do have you know, there are public library tie ups in Ohio that we can borrow items from, at least as far as OhioLINK is concerned, I imagine that we would be most interested in sort of, you know, what kind of potential there is for for our faculty and our students. So we're more focused on the academics. So that means that basically five percent of those 700 some odd loans were for around 20 academic institutions, that's still not too bad, though.

 

Phillip Gaddis It's not too bad. It does it does also imply that the borrowing was heavily done on the Films on Demand side, since they were the only vendor that allowed us to lend to public libraries. If you have a lot more academic libraries that you'll be dealing with, you may see a lot more usage from something like Swank. But it's also one of the reasons that we're excited about getting Alexander Street on board is because they'll let us loan to anybody again. And so we expect because we do have more public libraries than academic libraries, in Prospector. So our usage is almost always going to be skewed in that direction just because of our, you know, our base of potential borrowers.

 

Heather Crozier Yes, and we're definitely more heavily skewed to our academic than public. There's only a handful, I think, of public libraries that participate in OhioLINK borrowing.

 

Phillip Gaddis But that should just make something like Swank's model even more appealing to you, since you have more potential borrowers of academic.

 

Heather Crozier Yes. And speaking of Swank, we have a question about Swank and license expirations, so how would that affect a borrower's use and discoverability of an expiring title? So would the record indicate that a license may expire before the 21 days are up? Or do you have a way of cutting off something that may be too close to expiration?

 

Phillip Gaddis I'm going to have to let Katie answer that one.

 

Katie DiVittorio I don't think we've experienced that particular problem so far. You know, most of our most of our swing titles are like a calendar year. So we have the expire around the same time. So that's an interesting question that we have an experienced. I hope Swank would tell us before something -- They tend to give us a grace period to -- but yeah, it is good. Like in watching the video and the portal, it does like say like this is expiring date and I think this time and all of that. So hopefully patrons see that. But yeah, that's an interesting question that thankfully we haven't had the problem.

 

Heather Crozier Yeah, well, I think if you're if you're doing calendar year, whereas I think we're more likely to do a point of need order like somebody needs it, we're going to order it in the middle of April, that kind of thing. See, do we have other questions? That was the last one from the chat.

 

Katie DiVittorio Can I ask what Vendors you've got that OhioLINK is considering?

 

Heather Crozier Well, I think Swank would definitely be one that would be very appealing for us. Right now, we have a consortial subscription to Films on Demand, but I think somebody can correct me. I think that's through March of next year. So that might be something to look into after that. And oh, honestly, we haven't really talked about it. Yes Avon would be great because I know we looked at an institutional subscription and there just wasn't there wasn't enough to compel our faculty to feel really strongly about it but I know there's certain things that you can only get from one place.

 

Katie DiVittorio And we use Avon for that's what that's what we subscribe to for Alexander Street. And also our main contact has been Sarah Brennan and Alexander Street. And she was a former ILL librarian and very passionate. So that's somebody to talk to if your consortia is thinking about that. And I would also say for Films on Demand, please bring this up when you talk to them and encourage them to come back into this project. I think they need that encouragement.

 

Heather Crozier Yes. I think- is Joanna still here? Do you have any any ideas about who we might want to approach? Not hearing any other suggestions. Any other questions? I know the ones that I was wondering about whether or not the content is still available if you loan out and you answered that, so good. So, yes, I think seeing no additional questions pop up. I want to thank you very sincerely for your for doing this. This has been really great. I think I saw your presentation at ERNL and that was when I was like, oh, we need to try this. So I really hope this is something we can pursue.

 

Katie DiVittorio Thank you for having us. We're always happy to just share the work and try to encourage others to do.

 

Heather Crozier Yes. I think if we can move forward with that, we'll probably be peppering you with lots of questions as we move along.

 

Katie DiVittorio So the one last thing I'll say is one of the concerns that we have gotten when we've talked to other consortia is the the additional time, because I know ILL staff, they already feel overwhelmed. And, you know, Philip is the one at our library that does this, and you can correct me, but it's really not that much additional work. But Phillip, you want to talk about that?

 

Phillip Gaddis Yeah, I would say for the for the films on demand requests, it's probably three or four minutes of work per request. And for the for the Swank, because it's a little bit more you have to email them and get an email back from them. The amount of actual labor is like maybe five or six minutes. But there is like a day lag between when you ask when the you are out and when you get the URL back from them. So. So it does sort of stagger that work out. You can't just do it all at once and be done with it. You have to revisit it like the next day. But overall, I would say it wasn't a major problem for us in terms of workload.

 

Rose Nelson And I was just going to mention we are having multiple lenders, I think really helps. And also the staff at our libraries are used to the Springer process and so I think that helped, too. And just now we're doing streaming videos.

 

Heather Crozier That is good to know because I'm sure that would be the first question any of our directors would ask. All right. Well, thank you so much. It's been a good discussion. I think we've got a lot to think about and maybe work on.

 

Rose Nelson Yeah. Thanks for inviting us to.

 

Phillip Gaddis Thank you.

 

Katie DiVittorio Thank you. All right. Bye.

 

Heather Crozier Bye.