Hello and happy Tuesday! This week’s message is a bit of a longer one, beginning with last month’s usage statistics and ending with a handful of reminders on a variety of opportunities and timelines.
Have a wonderful week, everyone!
February’s Usage Statistics
Another month is over, and it was another month of incredible Sora usage by Wisconsin’s students!
When taking a look at checkouts per month, February tends to take a little dip after January, and this year was no different. But even with that dip, the number of titles checked out is still a huge increase over previous years in general, with 185,958 total checkouts!
A stat that didn’t take much of a dip last month was the number of students checking out titles. February had 38,689 individual Wisconsin students log in to Sora and check out at least one title, just 299 students less than in January!
You can view the full calendar year’s statistics, which includes detailed information on circulation numbers, holds, and other metrics, broken down by month, as a Google Sheet here.
If you’re interested in historical data, you can find .xlsx spreadsheets of past statistics at the bottom of the WSDLC Year to Date Statistics page.
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Reminder: Quarterly Selection of High-Demand Titles for Easy Advantage Ordering
Confession time: After yesterday’s WEMTA sessions, we realized that in February we’d stopped talking about the easiest way for WSDLC members to order packages of the most popular titles for their students. (Wherps!) But we’re getting ourselves back on track, and those details are here again for you now!
Every few months, the WSDLC’s dedicated Digital Content Specialist Librarian at OverDrive, Beth Saxton, will be identifying the most popular, high-demand titles in the shared collection, and prepackaging these titles into three different sets/carts (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, the title list, 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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OverDrive’s School Stars is Open for Submissions!
Has your school done some Sora-related marketing/promoting/sharing this school year that you’re proud of? Did you create a really cool-looking bulletin board or a social media post that got a lot of traction, or did your library host an event that included WSDLC’s digital materials and got students logging in to Sora? Whatever it is, share your idea with other Sora users worldwide!
OverDrive’s global contest, School Stars, celebrates the variety of ways schools promote Sora and will be open for submissions through March 29th! There are different categories to enter: bulletin boards, community engagement, social media posts, classroom engagement, and even an opportunity for your students to create something to submit!
If you’ve done any promotional work this school year (August 2023 – Time of entry), consider entering this contest! We say this often, but it always rings true: no accomplishment or action is too small to enter!
Learn more about School Stars here!
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Flipped Classrooms: Purchasing is on Now!
It’s now March, and this month we’ll be talking about Purchasing! (A nice tie-in to several of this year’s WEMTA sessions, too!) In this Flipped Classroom, you’ll get an inside look at how titles are selected and purchased for the Consortium. You’ll also find more details on how to purchase titles for your Advantage account: learn how to build and manage carts, add content credit, adjust the content access level for your purchases, and read some tips and tricks on how to avoid accidentally purchasing titles more than once (when you don’t necessarily mean to).
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 who may help 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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Later This Month: 2024-25 WSDLC Membership Renewal Quotes
We don’t have any updates on renewals this week, but again we’re sharing out past messaging on the details of the quote-process for those of you that are new to the WSDLC, new to this email group, or missed our previous messaging:
To help you in your planning, as long as your school/district hasn’t seen a large change in enrollment between 2022-23 and 2023-24, your estimated 2024-25 WSDLC Membership cost will be roughly the same as it was for 2023-24.
Details on Pricing Quote Calculation
WSDLC renewal pricing is based on DPI’s certified enrollment numbers for the previous academic year. To calculate costs for the 2024-25 WSDLC membership year, we will be using the FTE data for 2023-24. We will take the FTE for your enrolled grades, and multiply this by $1.65 to get your 2024-25 membership year cost.
As a reminder, in March 2023, the WSDLC Board approved keeping the cost per student steady for 2024-25, with a 2% increase for the following two membership years. The price will be $1.65 per student for the 2024-25 membership year; increasing to $1.72 per student for 2025-26; and $1.74 per student for 2026-27.
*For WiLS MyWiLS Members Please Note: WSDLC pricing is not loaded into your MyWiLS account but will be emailed to you.
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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/.
