Happy Tuesday! This week’s message may only include reminders, but they are worth the extra read! Coming up this week on Thursday is the webinar Navigating Challenges: What Districts Need to Know, hosted by DPI and CCBC (more details below). Just yesterday the WSDLC released the annual membership survey, which will be open for another 2 weeks. If you’ve been wondering how you can pull usage statistics for your school/district, check out this month’s Flipped Classroom! And finally, if you’re looking to reduce holds on popular titles that your students are after, take a look at the premade bundles of popular titles that can easily be ordered by completing the short form that is linked in the blurb!
The WSDLC has reached over 5.000,000 Lifetime Checkouts!
The title that holds the honor of being the 5 millionth checkout is *drumroll* Who Would Win: Lobster vs Crab, by Jerry Pallotta
- 1,000,000th checkout: December 4th, 2020 with Hard Luck: Diary of a Wimpy Kid Series, Book 8 by Jeff Kinney
- 2,000,000th checkout: November 22nd, 2021 with The Last Straw: Diary of a Wimpy Kid Series, Book 3, by Jeff Kinney
- 3,000,000th checkout: September 29th, 2022 with Wrecking Ball: Diary of a Wimpy Kid Series, Book 14, by Jeff Kinney
- 4,000,000th checkout: May 11th, 2023 with Trucks, by Gary Sprott
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The Annual WSDLC Membership Survey is Available!
The 2024 WSDLC Member Survey is an opportunity for member schools and districts to provide valuable feedback to the WSDLC Board and Project Managers: what do you love about the WSDLC and Sora; how is your school/district using the collections; do you have any pain points; and what kinds of updates would you like to see from Sora and the WSDLC in the future. Responses will be used to help the WSDLC Board further develop the Consortium and the OverDrive service. The link for the survey has been sent to all WSDLC members via email; if you did not receive the survey, please reach out to the WSDLC Project Managers at wsdlc-info@wils.org to have the link sent to you!
Thank you again for your time and thoughts!
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Flipped Classrooms: Usage Statistics
With a new month comes a new Flipped Classroom! January’s Flipped Classroom is Usage Statistics, where you will learn how to view your school’s and/or district’s usage statistics by utilizing Marketplace Insights. Insights is the area of your Marketplace account where you can run a variety of reports including, but certainly not limited to, the titles and formats that are getting checked out, what’s being purchased, how many holds are on titles, and how your students are interacting with Sora. You will also see how you can break down these reports to view usage at the consortium level, by only your school (Branch), or at the Advantage level.
Want to get ahead? In February, we’ll be focusing on Managing Holds, where you can look at how to make the most of your Advantage purchases, and a look at some of the features and programs OverDrive and the WSDLC employ to get the books your students want in to their hands sooner. There is also an excellent marketing resource regarding holds created by one of our members!
What are the WSDLC’s Flipped Classrooms?
The WSDLC offers a self-paced training series to help new members get oriented (and as a refresher for returning members) with their membership and the Sora collections. Every month, a different topic and set of materials are highlighted to help guide members throughout the school year. The content of these Flipped Classrooms is intended for Library Media Specialists and anyone else that may help to manage school/district library resources, OverDrive Advantage purchasing, and digital classroom materials. Materials are available for members to review independently, and OverDrive staff are ready to schedule one-on-one 20-minute sessions to answer members’ questions.
You can find more information on WSDLC Training opportunities and materials here: https://wsdlc.org/training/
Find the full calendar of self-paced training topics here: https://wsdlc.org/training/wsdlc-training-schedule/
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Reminder: January’s Selection of High-Demand Titles for Easy Advantage Ordering
It’s not too late to take advantage of preselected carts for Advantage ordering! Earlier this month, the WSDLC’s dedicated Digital Content Specialist Librarian at OverDrive identified the most popular, high-demand titles in the shared collection, and prepackaged these titles into three different sets (based on Content Access Levels) that you can purchase for only your students just by completing a quick Google form! No thinking about how to best leverage your budget, and no logging in to OverDrive Marketplace. Just a simple, straightforward way to reduce your students’ wait times on the titles they want most.
Please reach out to the WSDLC Project Managers at wsdlc-info@wils.org to get more information and the link(s) for purchasing!
Save yourself time and money, and help get those high-interest, high-hold titles into the hands of your students faster by ordering today!
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The WSDLC project managers and the team at OverDrive are always available if you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions.
Not sure who to contact? Check out this handy guide on the WSDLC website: https://wsdlc.org/who-to-contact-with-questions/.
