It’s the central challenge of anyone putting content on the web: choosing which content, how much content and how to distribute it for the least cost and the most benefit.
The population that has dealt with this problem the longest and actually gives advanced degrees in figuring out just how to do this properly are librarians. They are experts in curation – and they call it “collection development.”
But who curates for these curators?
For digital products, librarians can lean on the SaaS companies that manage and distribute their digital content. These primarily tech companies not only can tell the library about itself, but also have regional data about what is being purchased and borrowed elsewhere.
What are the practices that these companies have found that help their customers with what is a very sensitive cultural decision? I contacted three companies – Overdrive, 3M Cloud Library and BiblioBoard – and consulted with their collection development specialists.
Real time reports of what is circulating now
Overdrive has a staff of “collection development specialists,” reports Karen Estrovich, Collection Development Manager for the company. They function like account managers for a librarian’s collection. They run “list building reports, analyzing the data from other similar libraries.” She explains, “the library and the librarian has a full view into what is circulating in their system. So they can see what the most popular ebook title is checked out that month, they can see how many check outs they have. It’s all real time. You can refresh it and the data will update."
Because Overdrive is the dominant platform vendor for North American libraries, they have more data than their competitors about geographically or demographically similar libraries. Right now, only the collection specialists have access to reports that pull other cognate libraries' activity, but Estrovich says the company “is in development with that option, where they will be able to see, ‘I’m an urban library that serves a population of a million people, show me what other libraries are doing.’"
The human touch: aggregate recommendations from experts
Heather McCormack ,
Although she advocates fundamental use of data, she still believes that human judgment and experience have an important role. “As collection development manager of 3M Cloud Library, I work very hard to make the collection development librarian's job easier and, dare I say, much more fun. Every week, I sift through our publishing partners' feeds to identify ebooks that are especially attractive to the public library audience and to hash out new ways to showcase underrepresented content. On Fridays, I write and deploy a newsletter that contains a Top New Releases spreadsheet and summarizes trends and other publishing news from my perspective.” McCormack also makes recommendations via her Tumblr, Cloud Unbound.
Crowd source information about your hunches
McCormack says that often “My research is piecemeal and inspired by hunches. I read whatever studies I can get my hands on, glean insights from librarians' Twitter streams, and talk to customers and non-customers I've developed a rapport with. If I have a particular content obsession, as I did last spring with picture books for non-white children, I always ask the librarian hive mind questions via Twitter and Tumblr.”
Give the people what they want
“In the last couple of years we’ve instituted patron driven acquisition,” says David Burleigh, Director of Marketing at Overdrive. “It used to be that people come to the reference desk and say ‘hey, can you get this book?’” Burleigh says that Overdrive has made that part of the user experience for digital lending too because it is clearly important to library communities. “And then the technology took it to the next step by automating what used to be a labor intensive request.”
BiblioBoard’s Carolyn Morris, Vice President, Digital says that their advice in collection development “is really being directed by what we see as demand for mobile content. A lot of schools, for example, have a one to one tablet device program. Now those schools need content to go on them. And so we will be driven by that demand.”
Give the teachers what they want.
BiblioBoard specializes in working with institutional and school collections, as well as helping libraries put up local, unique or historical primary source content. Morris says the company has found that educators drive a lot of usage, in particular “modules” of primary source content that work with “common core standards.”
This is the first post of two looking at collection development in the digital library market.
