Just as the Dude was ready to start on a couple of rather extensive posts in response to some abstract concepts, he received a call from some overachievers who were compiling their OverDrive circulation data since their fiscal year has now ended. Actually, this was a good thing, because it led the Dude to revise the
Bibliostat page of the NLC website and brought his attention to some material there that was just a tad outdated. The pages should now be up to date, but if you notice any errors, please let me know.
This reporting on the survey is always confusing. For one, the survey asks for “Children’s” circulation, but OverDrive doesn’t use that same terminology. It uses Juvenile and Young Adult. Some might disagree, but the survey instructions indicate that you include young adult titles with children’s, so that is where they are counted.
Here’s the good news: You don’t even have to open that guide if you don’t want to. For OverDrive, all these numbers, for both consortium
holdings and OverDrive
circulations (both adult and children’s) should be prefilled on your survey. In past years, this was the source of a lot of undue stress and confusion about how to get these figures and how to do the necessary math to fit them into both adult and children’s categories. Well, math no more; prefill is our friend. It should be noted that if you have another service other than OverDrive, get out your calculators because you will need to add those numbers to the prefilled amounts. And for those of you who have a subscription to eBooks or Audiobooks with a patron-driven acquisition model (that’s a fancy way of saying that your library has access to a massive collection of eBooks or Audiobooks and you only pay for what your patrons want to read/listen to), then you need to get a bit creative.
For these types of things (we’re talking eBooks, Audiobooks, or videos here) the key is whether or not they are “returned” or permanently retained. Keep in mind that downloading something to a device only to have it disappear after a set period of time is the same thing as returned. For these things, you count the number of items circulated both as holdings and circulations. In other words, if you have access to a service that has a catalog of 1,000,000 eBooks and during the course of your fiscal year there are 10,000 eBooks that are downloaded, then you count 10,000 for your eBook holdings
and 10,000 added to your electronic materials circulation. If the items are retained and not returned, then you count those under electronic collections (in the technology part of the survey). There is a
guide on the website that was originally created by the state data coordinator from Arizona, and tweaked for use in Nebraska. Shaka.
