It’s March, and this month we’re focusing on creating organized collections of ebooks and audiobooks for students via Curation.
What is Curation?
Just like with your physical library collection, you can group, highlight, and promote titles that have a similar theme or genre to your students through curated collections in Sora. Curated lists developed by your district only show up for your students and honor content access levels when students are exploring the collections.
There are two types of collections you can create: curated collections and automated collections.
- Curated Collections: These collections are created by you, and are a hand-picked list of titles, usually with a common theme.
- Follow current or seasonal trends, like a list of books that will soon be movies, titles about a hot political or social issue, or holiday-themed titles.
- Build curated collections for one-time events, author- or series-based collections, and about topics that won’t be updated frequently.
- Example curated collections for schools: Meet Someone New (biographies and memoirs), Once Upon a Time (fairy tales and folk tales), and Out of the Ordinary (sci-fi).
- See recommended lists for schools created by OverDrive librarians to help build your collections.
- Automated Collections: These collections are based on criteria that you set, such as format or subject, and help showcase your content more broadly and enhance browsing for your users. For example, a New Chinese Ebooks collection lets users easily see titles that fit all of those categories without needing to search or filter.
- Automated collections refresh every 24 hours, so the content is always up-to-date.
- To ensure dynamic collections, feature formats and subjects that continue to build.
- Automated collections are broad in nature and work best with fairly simple criteria.
- Examples of automated collections include New Romance Ebooks, Audiobook Thrillers, Available Now, New Spanish Titles, or Most Popular Audiobooks.
How To Utilize Curation
The following videos will teach you how to create a custom list of content from the WSDLC collection as well as your Advantage account. Using custom lists can showcase content for your students for areas of curriculum as well as pleasure reading.
Start with this video to watch a walkthrough on how to curate collections for Sora:
(Link to video: Curating Collections for the Sora app)
Next, watch this short demo of an Advantage account curation within WSDLC
Additionally, OverDrive’s Marketplace Help has a wonderful step-by-step procedure on how to publish collections in Sora. In fact, you can find a treasure trove of information, how-tos, and walkthroughs from the Curation Marketplace Help page. Everything you could ever need is there, organized in a helpful Q&A format.
In October 2024, the WSDLC team at OverDrive shared this simple, step-by-step process:As a member of WSDLC you have a choice in what your student’s see on the Sora Explore page. You can show the WSDLC curations, or create your own with Advantage (custom) Curation. Curations help students find books that interest them, and curations in the WSDLC are refreshed monthly. If Advantage curation is turned on, students no longer see the regularly updated WSDLC curations.
Here is how to check if you have Advantage Curation on and how to turn it off so that your students see the WSDLC collections:
- Sign into OverDrive Marketplace.
- In the Curate drop-down, select Standard curation.
- Make sure “Customize Advantage collections” is set to NO if you want it off
- In the pop-up, click Save to confirm.
If you want to update your individual Advantage curations: Click Here to access training resources on creating and publishing curations.
This brings us to the end of another flipped classroom training session! Want to talk with an OverDrive expert about your curation needs? Schedule a one-on-one session! Contact wsdlc@overdrive.com to schedule your 20 minute session.
If you have questions specifically about the WSDLC consortium, you can contact wsdlc-info@wils.org.
Join us again in January for our next Flipped Classroom topic: Usage Statistics!
You can view the full year’s training plan and revisit previous Flipped Classrooms here: WSDLC Training Schedule