In attendance:  Stephanie Chase, Judah Hamer, Lucinda Walker

1. Minutes of the 10/21/08 were approved.

2. We are close to 10,000 checkouts on Listen Up! Vermont.  We will celebrate by giving the Library with the 10,000th checkout an MP3 player.  Libraries will be asked to highlight Listen Up! Vermont and the 10,000th checkout in their local papers and library publications.

3. Listen Up! Vermont – Round three:  Directors will contact those libraries who have yet to send in their agreements. 

4. Recorded Books – Joe Levy has given GMLC a quote for their downloadable program – however it is unclear at this time if RB will allow schools to use this service.  No decision will be made until this issue is cleared up.

5. The next KOHA meeting is scheduled for Feb. 20th at 9 a.m. in Hinesburg.

GMLC Directors will next meet on  Thursday April 16th in Randolph.

Ever wonder how much the Green Mountain Library Consortium has saved member libraries? In the 2009 membership year, and the grand total we saved is $2,440,354. Wow!

It breaks down like this:

If every Listen Up! Vermont member library purchased the equivalent amount of content (disregarding the administrative fees to OverDrive), the cost for the state would have been $2,091,679. Instead, as a group, we invested $30,635. This project is by far the clearest example of how working together can bring a service to Vermonters that would otherwise be impossible to provide due to the expense.

If every Recorded Books One Click member library purchased an individual account, the cost would be $230,256. Our member libraries instead purchased a group contract for $26,500.

If every vokal member library contracted with our support contractor, ByWater Solutions, to run their own Koha install, the cost, with data migration, would equal $158,800. Instead, our member libraries invested $15,501 to develop and support the beginnings of a consortium catalog.

With our latest project, the Mango Language learning database, if every participating library purchased an individual subscription, the cost would be $33,600. We negotiated a group rate for half that.

Finally, as you well know, the GMLC is entirely run by volunteers, who do all of the administrative work, including negotiating with vendors, billing and invoicing, materials selection, remote access for libraries, technical support, and more. These volunteers donated approximately 675 hours of their time to the organization in 2009, at no cost to the member libraries. If these 675 hours were paid at $20 an hour, that is $13,500.

The next time you take a look at your bill, or the participation cost for a new project, remember this post and the power of group purchasing. Would you be able to fit in the adminstrative time into your schedule to make the project happen? Would you have the technical expertise? Would you be able to afford to do the project on your own? All of our libraries participating in our two downloadable audio book projects are receiving both services for less than the cost of adding only the less expensive on their own. That’s savings!

Thank you, once again, to all of our volunteers that make the GMLC so successful.

Administrative Features

  • Go to https://libraries.mangolanguages.com/ and log in using the email you received your initial email at (it should be whatever email you have on file for the GMLC, such as your director or your tech contact). You can add additional admin email addresses or change your password once you have logged in.
  • The most important tab in the admin panel for you will likely be the statistics tab, where you can see how many sessions patrons have accessed, how long (in minutes) they spend on the site, and what languages they are accessing.

  •  The Promote tab is also a fantastic resource — click there for logos, guides, sample ads for your paper, sample blog posts and tweets, materials in foreign languages, and more.

Promoting Mango

  • Be sure your library shows up on the Mango Libraries search page. If you have successfully logged in from both the patron and administrative sides and your library shows you don’t have Mango on this list, visit http://www.mangolanguages.com/support and submit a Support Inquiry.

  • Look at all of the promotional materials available in the “Promote” section of your administrative portal, mentioned above. Have you put an ad or article in your paper? Do you have a prominent logo on your web site home page or database listings? Have you done a blog post, put the info on Facebook, or tweeted about it (Mango has their own Twitter account at @mangolanguages)?

 

Fellow librarians! Have you visited the OverDrive Marketplace? So much information is waiting for you to explore! Manage holds, return titles and reset downloads. Learn about OverDrive, get marketing materials or contact support.

Getting Statistics

  1. Login to Content Reserve
  2. Click on "Reports"
  3. Go to "Circulation Activity"
  4. To choose report options (such as sate range) click on "Run new report"
  5. Use "Create Worksheet" to open data in a spreadsheet

Resetting Downloads

  1. Login to Content Reserve
  2. Go to "Support" tab
  3. Search checkouts for the title
  4. Click on Details (far right of title)
  5. Scroll down to "Reset user's download ink"

View/Remove Holds on a title

  1. Login to Content Reserve
  2. Go to "Support" tab
  3. Uder End-user support choose "Manage holds"
  4. Click on the pencil in the Edit field

 DRM (Digital Rights Management) Issues

The support questions we receive for Listen Up! Vermont, powered by OverDrive, almost always fall into the category of problems related to Digital Rights Management, or DRM. You can help your patrons be successful in resolving their issue by suggesting they try these three steps first:

  1. Talk to your patron. Are they trying to download a format that works on their computer? A format that will work on their player? WMA and mp3 formatted titles will work on an iPod if transferred through a PC. Mac users can only access mp3 formatted titles. Users with iPod Touches and iPhones and Andriod phones using the OverDrive Media Console app need to first find an item to download in the browser on their phone, and the item must be in mp3 format (it will download directly to the device when using the app, light years easier than downloading to your computer and transferring).
  2. Open up the OverDrive Media Console and click on the Tools menu. Choose “Windows Media Player Security Upgrade.” This will automatically open Windows Media Player and update the DRM permissions; more often than not, this will solve the issue. Sometimes, the upgrade needs to be initiated manually; go to (in Internet Explorer only): http://drmlicense.one.microsoft.com/Indivsite
  3. Still not working? We all know Windows can be a little cranky. OverDrive then recommends resetting the DRM folder:

    1. Open the ‘Control Panel’.
    2. Open ‘Folder Options’ and select the ‘View’ tab.
    3. Select ‘Show hidden files and folders’.
    4. Uncheck ‘Hide protected operating system files’.
    5. In the warning message you receive, click ‘Yes’.
    6. Click ‘OK’.
    7. Close the Control Panel
    8. Rename the DRM folder to DRM.old.
    (You can find the folder most often under C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\ DRM)
    9. Close this window and open OverDrive Media Console.
    10. Go to “Tools > Windows Media Player Security Upgrade” (as above).