Meeting Minutes for 10/12/2021

• Liz is leaving for another position and will no longer be the ECC chair.
• Liz nominated Jo to be her replacement.
• Jo mentioned that she is going part-time in her position in about 11 months, so she could only be a temporary replacement as the chair. Jo mentioned that if others wanted to step up, she would encourage them to do so.
  • Jo agreed to be the temporary chair for the November 9th meeting. Since Jo is only a temporary chair we will not need the Marmot Board approval. Another, more permanent, chair will have to go through a more formal process. 
• Liz shared her duties as the chair.
  • Adam, Tammy, and Liz share emails about the agenda items for each meeting.
  • Starting and keeping the meeting on track.
  • It is helpful to know about the eContent you provide for patrons since this is the reason for the committee.
• Anyone interested in being the chair, please contact Tammy.

Curation Members 

• Liz will also be leaving the curation team. 
• She asked for volunteers to work on this team.
• Liz dedicates about 2 hours a month to work on the curated lists, but others do not have to spend that much time.
• It helps if the team consists of 3 or 4 people.
• It makes a difference in the circulation stats when you make a curated list and push it to the top. 
  • It can also help get highlight titles that are not getting the circs that they deserve.
• Anyone interested in being on the curation team, please contact Tammy.

Recommend To Library (RTL) Discussion (Abbey Patton, OverDrive) 

• RTL is taking a good deal of people’s time and money
• Abbey Patton has some ideas about how libraries can work on mitigating this service without turning it off
• Currently, when a patron searches for a title they are shown all the available titles. If the title is not owned by Marmot libraries at the time they search they get a message saying, “Didn’t find what you’re looking for?” and they see a list of titles and formats that will match their search if OverDrive owns it. The patron can click on the icon to recommend the title for their library to purchase.
• Marmot started with 7 recommendations and found that was too many. It was changed to 3 recommendations a month. 
• Abbey suggested changing the view for RTL. Instead of people doing a search and having the recommendations immediately pop up, we could have this set to only show the RTL on the sidebar on the left under Availability. The patron would have to click on the “add titles the library doesn’t own” link.

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• Once a person clicks on that link, they will be redirected to the Recommend to library page where they are shown the options to recommend a title.

RTL Discussion

• The group agreed to make the change to the RTL setup.
• The change was made on Thursday, October 14, 2021.
• The group discussed whether to change the 3 recommendations to 2 recommendations.
  • The group decided to keep the 3 recommendations until they see how the new display for RTL works to cut down on the recommendations.
• This can be revisited if the new display still does not slow down a large number of recommendations each month.
• Jo mentioned that she looks at the p-type of the person making the recommendation. Anyone who has a p-type for a visitor Jo asks them to request the title from their home library. 
• Abbe showed us how to find the patron information to send regret emails.
  • Go the Marketplace 
  • Click on the Insights link on the top toolbar
  • Go to Title activity reports and Recommended titles report
  • Search by title and limit to your Branch
  • Click on the title in the report and the patron email address and User ID will display in the Recommended titles report details.

RTL Q & A

• Q: Can titles be deleted from the RTL?
• A: You can delete them from your cart, but you cannot delete them from recommendation history. You can set up your Automate cards settings and click on your RTL manager. Under the “Do you want to exclude titles that have already been recommended” set that to “Yes, exclude titles that have already been recommended.” The one caveat is that if a title is recommended a month ago and a second recommendation comes in the past week, it will not show up. If you choose this option, Abbey recommends that you run the Recommend titles report every month to look for titles that are not in your collection and see how many recommendations each title has to decide if you want to purchase it.   
• Q: If you purchase a title, should it come off the RTL list?
• A: No, it will remain on the Recommended titles report. If you switch the Recommended titles report parameters to only show the titles that are not in your collection then it will no longer show up.
• Q: If a title is purchased through Cost Per Circ (CPC) would it be the same situation?
• A: Yes, it will be the same situation unless you revoke the title. If you revoke the title it will show back up as not in the collection. Adding a CPC title is the same as purchasing it. The patron is going to get that notification and be automatically placed in the holds list. 
• Q: Is the RTL feature on the Libby app?
• A: It is not on the Libby app. It will be in the future in some sense. It will be a different functionality and patron view but it will remain the same on the Marketplace side. The only place to find it now is on the marmot.overdrive.com site or the OverDrive app.         

Other Business

• Pika Requiring Passwords Question
  • Rebecca asked when Pika would be requiring passwords
  • Adam responded that the functionality for the passwords is something the developers have prioritized for this quarter. Whether or not it will be finished by the end of the calendar year or go into the first quarter release for 2022 remains to be seen. It is high on the developers’ roadmap and is a priority that Pascal is working on now. 
  • The trial with Mesa County for the patron passwords in Sierra functionality will need to be built in Pika.   
• Patron Point Product (Adam)
  • Adam received a reach out from a sales rep for Patron Point that is a patron experience management tool to help with marketing. It is a marketing automation platform.   
  • Adam was curious if that was something that the committee wanted Marmot to explore. He has never worked with the product but wondered if this group wanted to see a demo. The committee could bring in their marketing folks to see if it would be of interest to them. 
  • Liz recommended having Tammy send them the vendor questionnaire form. 
  • Action Item: Adam will share his contact person information with Tammy who will send them the vendor questionnaire. Tammy will send the information out to the group to gauge interest.
• Blackstone Audio Subcommittee Needed
  • Liz used to also participate in the Blackstone Audio subcommittee to find replacement titles for the ones with lower circulation. 
  • Tammy will be asking for volunteers for this subcommittee depending on the outcome of the  December meeting if the group agrees to move forward with purchasing another 25 shared Blackstone Audio titles.

The next meeting is on November 9th at 1 p.m.