[Lswtalk] Suggestions for containing OD costs

[Loretta Gharst]

Last email on OD budget.  At current rate of expenditure we will be underfunded for 2017.
This is based on the weekly orders for the last couple of months.
We can change some of the service - allow fewer requests per patron and/or increase funding.

Below is kind of long and closes with question about ways to control cost of patron requests.

Your suggestions welcome and hope to see you in February.

Loretta

From: Loretta Gharst
Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2017 11:47 AM
To: Michael Broussard; Debbie LeBeau
Subject: RE: Overdrive carts ready

Let's talk about PRs.  My comments:

Wow number of PR are growing a lot.
Looking at the LSW OverDrive RTL statistics the monthly count for 2016 was 489 -661 requests, then in Nov jumped to 860 requests, in Dec was 1,018 requests.
At the rate of the first cart in January we are looking at between 900-1,000 PR monthly. (This is raw number of requests before Mike edits.)

In 2016 we budgeted $278,000 for OverDrive in our budget and other library systems provided $40,000 (BPL $10,000 - thanks!), for total budget of $320,000.
According to Mike's order spreadsheet we ordered $328,967.90 with OverDrive of which $171,772.42 was for PR.

I ran the number for PR by library system and Calcasieu patrons account for 2/3 of PR.  So the other LSW libraries are 1/3 of PR.

2017 OverDrive budget is $378,500 + at least $35,000 from LSW for minimum of $413,500.
If 2017 orders average $10,000 a week that would be $520,000 and we could possibly be $100,000 short.
Average of $8,000 a week would be OK, but thinking we need to do something to eliminate some more of the patron requests as that is the biggest single expense.
(Also, this year discuss with LSW OverDrive consortia members increasing their contribution whether that be one time only, flat figure, or percentage of  budget so doesn't hurt systems with smaller annual budgets.)

Anyway, how about eliminating PR based on cost or pub date?

Any suggestions?

Please advise and thanks,

Loretta


Mike's Suggestions on How to Contain Costs:

Are we still going to be purchasing MARC records for LSW? That would give us a tiny amount of extra money each month.

If ya'll are in agreement we could maybe limit the amount of requests a patron can place for OverDrive --- currently we allow 1 for every 1 day which amounts to 7 a week with 1 library card. And remember we determined some patrons have more than 1 library card ----children, spouse, etc... that they can use to place recommendations on.

Before we start limiting by price or publication date (harder to manage and no place for us to state our limitations on LSW website so every library system would have to explain in some way to their patrons) I think maybe we should explore maybe only letting patrons request 1 item every 3 days or something like that (I think 2-4 recommendations per week is adequate), or at least less than 7 per week per library card.

At least by limiting their requests the LSW site would let them know that they have reached their limit - and then they can try again later.
Also, I think staff, either with our system or other systems, have learned that all they need to do is place a hold on a request and we will more than likely purchase it.
Some titles I notice that were in PR cart then don't get checked out because the patron (or staff member) just cancels the hold once we have purchased it.
Maybe it needs to be stressed again to our staff and all of LSW that the longest you would wait for a digital title if already released would be 7 days so no need to get "just in case someone might want it"   ---- if staff asks then no they don't need to do selection for OverDrive because it is already patron driven and we select most of the prominent authors and also select the bestsellers.
The LSW consortia money  ($5000 or higher) is to be a member of LSW OverDrive Consortia and includes us doing the ordering work for them while providing access to all the resources that have already been purchased. It would help to offset the costs if any selection they want to do above, say $500 a year, could come out of their own budget not the money they contributed to the consortia.
We could monitor and after $500 we wouldn't purchase any carts for them but they are welcome to purchase anything they want from their own OverDrive marketplace log-in and use their own account.
For only $5000 a year "membership fee" they have access to an extremely robust collection in OverDrive thanks to all of us combining resources.

Currently for fiction titles we purchase no matter what the publication year is. Some really old books have only recently (last 10 years or so) become available as digital, and some are just plain old.
Currently for non-fiction titles I don't purchase anything older than 10 years, but I need to know if I should go by on-sale date or street date for the year ---- these can have a huge difference. I have been going by street date not on-sale date to purchase non-fiction titles. If I go by on-sale date then a lot of PR non-fiction titles would not get purchased.

Just want to point out that the publication year doesn't actually show up on LSW site so patron doesn't actually know how old it is.

Anyway, please be thinking about this and maybe we can vote on more limits for patron requests per user.
Instead of 7 per week, make it 4 per week or 2 per week?

Please advise and thanks,

Loretta

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