Internship Journal, Week 2: September 4 & 6
10 September 2024
As it turns out, my fledgling sense for acquisition was pretty good, actually! Though I missed a handful of releases from not having the chance to consult a couple other selection aids, most of my decisions on what to purchase and how many copies were almost the exact same that the Prince would have made himself. Impressed as he was, once the Prince finished his walking through his process of managing CRRL's eResources on Wednesday, I was immediately sent into building a hypothetical new releases cart for the next week.
Which is nice, because the process of managing CRRL's digital materials is a whole other magnitude of complex. And, in my honest estimation, pretty predatory.
There's probably a terabyte's worth of text on the internet explaining how the mass integration of corporate-owned digital infrastructure into global society has erected some of the most unreasonably arbitrary and absurdly expensive hurdles humans could have ever devised.1 In libraryland's specific case, with the advent of eBooks in the early aughts, companies that were negotiating with the Big 5 publisher conglomerates to digitize and sell their books scaled up into giants in their own right as they gained the their resources to reach a national audience. And as is inevitable when big business interests conspire, eMaterial lending platforms shifted from just one copy/one user, the model most similar to physical material lending, to an array of convoluted restrictions (Gross, 2021). For CRRL, those platforms are Libby and hoopla, owned by vendors OverDrive and Midwest Tape, respectively. OverDrive is the longer-running and more widely-used of the two with the popular app Libby, offering patrons eBooks and eAudiobooks from every major publisher. hoopla, at the cost of losing out on release date or even complete access to books from some major publishers, lends out items that can have unlimited concurrent borrowers and no wait times—an arrangement that is much too contingent to be painless, which we'll soon get to.
But just to be clear: in no sense can libraries' "ownership" and "lending" of eMaterials resemble that of their physical counterparts, due to the restrictions imposed by the platforms facilitating the actual access. Today, eMaterials on OverDrive are licensed under three different models: metered access (MA), cost per circulation (CPC), and one copy/one user (OC/OU).
Metered access is the primary model publishers offer their books under—as the name implies, there are different measurements that are used to determine how long a library can lend out a book. MA by time is simply limited to however long is specified upon purchasing, usually either a year or two. MA by checkouts can be borrowed a specific number times before expiring, either 26 or 52 times. Simultaneous MA is the same as MA by checkouts, but can be borrowed by more than one person. And then, there are hybrid MAs which combine both restrictions; when time runs out or the number of checkouts is reached, whichever happens first, patrons can no longer borrow that item until the library repurchases another copy.
This all might seem sensibly precautionary, given the ease of digital reproduction and piracy. Here's the kicker: many eMaterials are licensed for prices anywhere from double to quadruple the price someone would buy the same item from a storefront, regardless of model. I wasn't able to record any exact numbers for comparison through my head spinning and scattered note-taking, but the average MA book goes for about $50 every year or two. And again, physical items are usually purchased by libraries for half of retail price, so the gulf can get even more vast. Sometimes, prices can be lowered for enduring classics or other books that are already widely available for whatever reason. But, thanks to the seamlessly shifting virtual levers built into online platforms, they can also very easily be raised without notice, like Peter Brown's middle grade novel The Wild Robot, cashing out on a surge in popularity from its soon-to-be-released movie adaptation. The pain is made all the more acute by how short the access windows are—a popular physical book might not necessarily stick around for as long as the library will have access to the eMaterial counterpart, but items with merely modest interest can definitely stay for longer than a couple years or 30-something checkouts.
Since MA is supposedly the most common model publishers use, the others should probably be understood in relation to MA. One copy, one user items are still around to offer somewhat "permanent" ownership to libraries like physical books, yet are, of course, vanishingly rare as the big 5 publishers have all but abandoned the model. In a deceptively enticing contrast to the others, cost per circulation items have no restrictions on lending—unlimited number of borrowers, unlimited number of checkouts.
This is the only borrowing model offered by hoopla, which CRRL began offering sometime last year. It's promoted as a more convenient option for eMaterials patrons, as the lack of restrictions on CPC materials means there are no wait times or hold lists for immediate access to a book they want. As I learned/reminded myself while writing this journal, though, there are actually some pretty significant restrictions: hoopla eBooks cannot be read outside of its proprietary platform, i.e. on Kindles and the like, and patrons are limited by CRRL to only five items each month. Publishers still don't seem to like CPC borrowing even then, so for the most part, hoopla's catalog is mostly made of the most popular of the popular series.
Predictably, there's an even more exacting string attached to hoopla and all CPC materials—whenever a user borrows an item, the cost of that item is invoiced on a running total to the library. So if there's a book that gets a viral TikTok or its author ascends to political significance or something, demand for those items are liable to spiral into a liability for making sure there's money for everyone to borrow the materials they need.
With that enormous albatross weighing things down, the Prince has a specific order he manages each kind of eMaterial in. First, books that have been recently released—since neither platform allows for pre-orders, books have to be acquired the week of their release, usually on Tuesday. While due diligence is still done for every purchase, hard numbers are the biggest factor determining whether a format is needed or not. If a new book has a certain ratio of holds to copies, then the Prince will order eBook and/or eAudiobook version, which are separated into format-specific carts. (Unless I'm mistaken, this is the same measurement used for preexisting books that have hit a number of holds as well, though I don't think items that circulate a lot physically get new eMaterials if they weren't already getting repurchased.) After those, the Prince goes over the Notify Me requests, items that have been specifically requested by patrons through Libby, usually approving those that have received 3 requests or more. Finally, there are the items whose MA licenses have expired: if their circulation hasn't waned to no longer justify however much it might cost, then it'll receive another tenure in the digital stacks.
The entire time he does this, the Prince has Midwest's backend marketplace open in another tab, cross comparing whether it would be cheaper to purchase/repurchase access to an item in OverDrive or get it on hoopla. Outside of some precious few guarantees like Scholastic books being cheaper on the latter, calculations for these are noticeably stricter than normal—if I remember the math correctly, the time or checkout limit an item has is divided by the actual number of circulations to determine the theoretical CPC. Whether or not the CPC is low enough to warrant purchasing can be conditional, but the general rule is to aim for around $3/circ for popular books, and less than $2/circ for everything else. According to the Prince, the list of books that have to be on a given day can be long enough to stretch into hours, but his demonstration this Wednesday seemingly took a little over a singular hour.
After all that's done, the carts are purchased, invoices are retrieved for some (dreaded?) budget balancing, of which my math-deficient brain is too befuddled by to even attempt to describe here. I'm sure I can learn to grasp all the number-crunching, if not be forced to whenever I have to actually add things to CRRL's public-facing OverDrive page later on, but it'll take a looooong while before I'd feel confident enough to professionally balance a slice of an entire system's coffers at this scale. God help any system that'll be crazy enough to let me do that.
Anyway. All that digital flailing around behind the scenes, just so patrons can think borrowing eMaterials is as airtight as the entire concept of the cloud (read: server stacks up in Loundon County). The process of getting new physical books into the collection is probably comparably complex, but the arbitrary hoops that platform owners love to add can cost a lot of unnecessary effort. Case in point: the process of properly pulling up a record on an OverDrive item is just slightly too involved that weeding is deferred from the Prince to Miss Major, the acquisitions assistant. The full circulation stats of an item can't be viewed on its Marketplace page, but every record is identifiable by a specific string of characters in its URL—one has to copy that string, pull up a specific interface that can view the full suite of information about an item, then paste it into a filter that will pull it up. That same string is what's needed to take it out of the system as well, as anyone weeding has to make sure they're disconnecting the exact record so that patrons can't pull up items that don't exist in the system anymore. Obtuse as it might be, I'm sure one can take at least a little solace from how straightforward taking out items are compared to putting them in...
Friday, naturally, turned out to be a much less head-spinning day, since because both new tasks were familiar to me from working in a branch. First up was materials management, that ceaseless, cumulatively infuriating ordeal of trying to keep CRRL's collection of around 600,000 items presentable by determining what items have endured enough wear or outright damage to be removed. In my position at work, that mostly involves a lot of deference—since clerks are the ones checking the vast majority of materials in, we're usually the ones identifying these materials as they come, taking them out of circulation by changing their status in our ILS. Whether or not an item is removed or remains is left to our supervisors to decide whenever they have the chance to get to the perpetually-filling cart of materials in need of attention.
Sometimes, though, there are items bearing specific kinds of damage that supervisors can't remedy: heavily scratched DVDs or audiobook CDs, items that have been lost for so long that they been phased out of the system but returned in good condition, books with torn jackets or spine stickers that have peeled off. Those items require some more specific attention than what's given in a branch—which means they get sent off to Collection Services with a nice, bright-red slip that should include a written description of what the issue is inside.
I'm pretty sure I completely missed what tasks regarding these items are given to who in Collection Services other than age level, but in the Prince's position as final juvie adjudicator, most items that don't need physical mending go to him. And if that italicized should wasn't a clue, a lot of the items that end up on his desk are for reasons entirely unknown due to a lack of description. Phased out items without a written sender or branch or origin? Yep. Items that have been sitting around for actual years without being checked out? You bet. Items that are very obviously in poor enough condition that they should've been weeded upon return? Whyyyyyyyy. Whether due to innocuous overlooking or just genuine uncaring, lots of red-slipped items are shipped off as if they're saying "in your authority, clearly you know everything about books to remedy this issue with no effect on your own workload, please fix it, Prince-senpai!" 2
Suffice to say, the Prince was quite annoyed when describing the proper procedures to me. Only a small selection of those items will find their way back to a shelf for circulation—the rest either got weeded days or weeks later than they should, or stamped and sent off to ThriftBooks. As vital as it is to keep our shelves from overflowing with garbage, managing worn and/or damaged books is probably one of the most perpetually annoying tasks we have to do, disproportionately more so than it should be.
Speaking of annoying tasks that are prone to overload things, there's also the matter of donations—books of varying degree of wear and tear that go through basically the exact same evaluation, only customers are always giving us boxes of them ad infinitum. The vast majority of donations are far from suitable for CRRL's collection—years or decades old, or worn from use or dusty from sitting around, or textbooks or magazines or software discs we have no use for, or a combination of the three; all pouring in at such a high volume that I constantly wonder where patrons think we're going to keep all these. The answer, of course, is that we don't—anything that isn't obviously pulp is kept only to be sold in the numerous secondhand book sales happening around the system. Given the sheer amount of donations we receive, the primary duties branch volunteers seem to be saddled with is sifting through everything and pricing what's salvageable for these very sales.
Thankfully, the cartful of donations that had been languishing next to the Prince's office were the opposite of the above—books in almost pristine condition that they were candidates for actually being added to CRRL's collection. My main task for Friday was to give the Prince a hand in picking out the lucky candidates, which we managed to completely finish up not long into the afternoon. Most of my share was laughably easy due to being mostly made of books from the veritable gods of juvenile publishing; your Pilkeys, your Kinneys, your Riordans. Other books without much fanfare had to be evaluated with more or less the same way I would new releases: checking author names, seeing how well their books have circulated, occasionally looking up reviews for said book or a past one online.
If an item was deemed worthy, it would have to be primed to smoothly make rounds through the department: taking a sticky note, indicating whether an item is being added to an existing record or is a brand-new addition to the collection, what category it ought to be catalogued as, what stickers it might need, and so on. At the end of this process, the Prince and I organized them nicely on a cart, then handed it off to Miss Major to start preparing the following Monday.
And as I learned just before writing this paragraph, by the time this journal is posted, some of these books will have already been processed and sent off to branches for kids to get their hands on. This early into my internship, I've already left a tiny, tangible mark on the collection, which I can definitely take a little solace from. I'm hoping they can get through a few dozen circs before becoming problems themselves.
1 ^See journalist and sci-fi author Cory Doctorow's seminal article coining the term "enshittification" (Doctorow, 2023a) and blog post about "technofeudalism" (Doctorow, 2023b) for some good examples.
2 ^My feelings about this conundrum will remain forever mixed. On one hand: come on y'all, putting things on the proper status and writing the problem on the slip is like an extra thirty seconds baked into your job, none of this stuff is rocket science. On the other hand, due to the likely vast gulf in life situation and/or socioeconomic precarity between workers doing front-facing service and workers in an office, I think it's a mistake to assume folks on the lower end of a pecking order have the same level of devotion to their job as those higher up. Not to mention that even though I'm good enough at sticking to policy, there are plenty of times when I'll randomly decide to cut corners on a whim...
References
Doctorow, C. (2023a, January 23). The ‘enshittification’ of TikTok. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Doctorow, C. (2023b, September 28). Varoufakis’s “Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism?” Pluralistic. https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/
Gross, D. A. (2021, September 2). The surprisingly big business of library e-books. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/an-app-called-libby-and-the-surprisingly-big-business-of-library-e-books