Weekly Message: December 17th, 2024

It’s Tuesday, which means it’s time for another message from the WSDLC Project Managers. This week’s message is largely filled with reminders: from December’s Advantage Bundle Carts to this month’s all-new Flipped Classroom: Advantage and Sora Features; and highlighting WSDLC Member achievements in the newest Tiny Case Study: Audiobooks for Accessibility with Title Assignments and a reminder that WSDLC members are encouraged to review their Advantage materials to ensure titles are in their best-fit Content Access Levels.
This week’s message is also the last one for 2024. It’s been a splendid year for the WSDLC, and we’re very excited to see and share the total stats for January-December 2024.
Take care, and we wish you all gentle holidays.

Reminder: December’s All-New Advantage Bundle Carts!

The WSDLC’s dedicated Digital Content Specialist, Beth Saxton, has created an all-new series of sets of titles for WSDLC members to easily purchase for their Advantage collections! No logging into Marketplace, and no trying to figure out how to get the most of your funds. Just a simple, straightforward way to reduce your students’ wait times on the titles they want most!

When schools are ready to purchase any of these packages, you can submit your order through their linked Google Form order forms. When completing the form(s), you’ll have the opportunity to specify in you’d like your purchase(s) to billed by invoice, issuing a PO, or by content credit that you already have deposited in your Advantage Account(s).

This month’s bundle-theme is Buzz Books! These carts include titles available in Sora that have been included in lists from Newbery, Caldecott, and Printz!
December 2024’s Buzz Books Title Bundles
Caldecott: 19 titles for $402.56
Newbery: 23 titles for $503.01
Printz: 21 titles for $503.73
Please reach out to wsdlc-info@wils.org for title lists and the order form.

And Beth didn’t stop there! December also has an all-new cart of December’s High-Demand Elementary Titles!
December 2024’s High-Demand Elementary Title Bundle
High-Demand Elementary: 22 titles for $505.91
Please reach out to wsdlc-info@wils.org for the title list and order form.

Notes:
“High Demand” is determined as the audiobooks and ebooks that have the highest numbers of holds and checkouts within the shared collections.
These lists are not customizable for ordering. Please reach out to the OverDrive team at wsdlc@overdrive.com for additional options.

Save yourself time and money, and help get those high-interest, high-hold titles into the hands of your students faster by ordering today!

⸻ ● ● ● ⸻

Flipped Classroom: Advantage & Sora Features (All New!)

In October’s Flipped Classroom, we introduced the basics of Advantage Accounts, last month we covered the larger topic of Purchasing with your Advantage Account, and a little later this school we’ll cover running Usage Statistics with your Advantage Account– but beyond these three major topics, we realized that there was a gap in information about how WSDLC Members can take their Advantage Accounts even further. And so for December, we’re bridging that gap and bringing an all-new Flipped Classroom into the mix with Advantage & Sora Features!

The Advantage & Sora Features Flipped Classroom starts with a quick review of Advantage Accounts and OverDrive Marketplace, and then dives into the Top 5 Most Impactful Tools and Best-Practices, of particular use for school library staff who don’t have a ton of extra time on their hands to learn something new, but want to help leverage their Sora collections in the most meaningful way(s).
This Flipped Classroom then wraps up with exploring even more of the wide array of features and tools available to all WSDLC Members from their Advantage Accounts: curation, dashboards, shelf talkers… the list can go on!

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/

⸻ ● ● ● ⸻

Tiny Case Studies: Audiobooks for Accessibility with Title Assignments

December’s training materials comes with a side of a Tiny Case Study! This month, we’re highlighting our newest Tiny Case Study: Audiobooks for Accessibility with Title Assignments, submitted by Green Bay Area School District’s Raquel Rand!
Description: “Some of our students struggle to follow along with grade level books. They may be able to comprehend the story, but the physical act of reading may prevent a student from being successful.”

​What Are Tiny Case Studies?
WSDLC’s Tiny Case Studies are brief, practical summaries of outstanding things that some WSDLC members are doing that involve Sora and serve as an opportunity for members to share a WSDLC-related problem they had and how they solved it.

If you’ve done something lately that you’d like to share with the WSDLC Community, let us know! Maybe you’ve put together some creative marketing, started a student reading book club, engaged your school’s teachers on how they can utilize these resources in their classroom, or made a successful case for funding. No idea or accomplishment is too small! You can submit your own tiny case study idea by email at wsdlc-info@wils.org or complete the idea form, and we will reach out to you with the next steps!

You can view all of the WSDLC’s Tiny Case Studies here.

⸻ ● ● ● ⸻

Reminder: New Content Access Levels: & Title Collection Adjustments

In October, the previous three collections of materials were split into five collections. The WSDLC team at OverDrive went through all titles in the shared collection, and comparing them to trusted review sources, made sure titles were included in the appropriate collections. However, OverDrive staff are not able to do this for districts’ Advantage titles: if your district has an Advantage collection, you will want to make sure to go through your owned titles and make adjustments as needed.

So, in short:
What to Do If You Find a Title That Should Be Placed in a Different CAL/Collection:

  • Consortium Titles: OverDrive is making these updates. If you notice any titles that should be in a different Content Access Level/Collection, please reach out to the WSDLC Project Managers at wsdlc-info@wils.org to receive a link to complete the form to alert OverDrive staff.
    Note: Titles in your Advantage collection may be set differently than the consortium. Please check ownership of the title before completing the form.
  • Advantage Titles: Schools are responsible for updating the CALs on their Advantage-owned Titles. This is done in Marketplace with the Content Access Level tool:
    1. Log in to OverDrive Marketplace
    2. From the top-menu ribbon, Select Admin, then Content access levels
    3. Search for the title(s) you want to edit if you have something specific in mind; otherwise adjust Period Type to “specific” and leave the date fields blank to return a list of all titles.
    4. Click on the Edit button (pencil icon) to adjust the title’s CAL in your Advantage collection. This very helpful video from OverDrive covers this full process in detail, too. Note: The video references CALs that are different than in the WSDLC; but the process is the same. 

    Need help identifying the titles that might need a review by you or another staff members? The WSDLC’s always-amazing Digital Content Specialist at OverDrive, Beth Saxton, has your back! Just reach out to wsdlc@overdrive.com, and Beth will generate a report that shows the current Content Access Level and lowest reviewed grade for their collection. Schools would then be able to use filters in Excel to identify books and change them in the CAL tool in Marketplace.Not only that, but Beth also has a quick-hack for schools to identify titles if they can’t go book by book: “As a general note on Consortium/Advantage owned titles: if an Advantage-owned title has a different CAL than in the consortium, the lower CAL wins. For example, if your school has set all the elementary books to Upper Elementary, younger students will still see anything set for Lower Elementary in the consortium (which is going to be most things a school has). So, setting all elementary books to Upper Elementary should work as a quick precaution while still letting younger students see their books.”

If you would like to adjust your district’s access, or if you have any questions about the new CALs, please reach out to the WSDLC team at OverDrive at wsdlc@overdrive.com.

⸻ ● ● ● ⸻

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/.