Ohio: “Local Libraries Struggle to Balance Cost of Digital Services Against Demand”

A report from Ohio.
From the Sandusky Register:

When the CLEVNET library consortium stopped offering Hoopla Digital, the most popular digital library service, almost all public libraries in the Sandusky area faced a choice.
Do they spend additional money to continue offering Hoopla to their patrons, or do they drop the service?
In every case the Register could learn about, local libraries came up with extra money and kept offering Hoopla.
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CLEVNET officials didn’t return a phone call from Register asking about why it dropped Hoopla, but James Tolbert, director of the Milan-Berlin Library District, said Hoopla refused to give CLEVNET a consortium discount. CLEVNET hadn’t raised membership fees to cover the Hoopla cost and found it couldn’t afford Hoopla, Tolbert said.
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So CLEVNET decided to let individual libraries decide whether to keep the service.
Tolbert, who said each Hoopla checkout by a patron costs his library an average of $1.77, decided to budget $1,500 to try keeping the service for a year. Each patron is allowed 10 checkouts a month, the same as before, Tolbert said.

Other libraries mentioned in the article include:

• Sandusky Public Library: 25,376 cardholder/781 patrons registered to use hoopla
• Ida Rupp Public Library (Port Clinton, OH): approx. 13,600 patrons/350 registered for hoopla

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Filed under: Digital Collections, Interactive Tools, Libraries, News, Patrons and Users, Public Libraries