Internship Journal, Week 5: September 25 & 27
01 October 2024
The universe seems to be smiling down on my internship in myriad ways, but one unexpectedly specific way has been serendipitously giving me a taste of all the things that end up on an upper-level/head collections librarian plate. Case in point with a change of plans: a meeting with a Midwest representative suddenly wedged itself onto the head collection crew's Wednesday calendars, and I was given the chance to sit in on their negotiations with this rep.
At least, negotiations involving haggling over feature and item pricing and/or gently barbed jabs referencing what grievances were aired at the MACDC meeting is supposedly what would have transpired, if the Prince and co. weren't receiving a comprehensive report of CRRL's first year of hoopla. Though inconspicuous "you can save more money (maybe) if you add this feature to your contract!" appeals were sprinkled here and there, the rep was largely just painting an overall picture of how patrons have taken to the platform: what types of materials were circulating the most (audiobooks gallore), the average cost per circ (around the $2~2.99 range), the most popular times patrons like to borrow items (Wednesday nights at 9pm???), the monthly intake of users (a few hundred each month when it was first introduced, but now staying at a consistent 100~200/month), how many patrons reach the monthly 5 circ limit (steadily rising), and more specific statistics besides.
For my part, I just kept quiet and added occasional fact or three when a conversation called for it. Baby librarian and lack of true bigger-picture knowledge about CRRL's collection aside, I'm actually not particularly confident in whatever skills I could have as a negotiator. Not least because however accommodating as a company representative might seem or truly be, from my understanding any favor that they can promise is limited by the fact that the entity that they represent is there to make money, at the expense of library systems if they can have it. One specific concern voiced at the MACDC meeting was about AI-generated content appearing in a system's hoopla interface that patrons were able to borrow. The Captain raised this concern to the representative, who acknowledged that with prior awareness, then made assurances of measures Midwest says it "will" take—but you only need to research why your favorite social media platform is so bad now to know how often tech companies "will" take action on problems.
Still, the Prince and co. seemed to be quite satisfied with what the system has gotten out of their relationship so far. hoopla was specifically adopted for the system as a response to the eMaterial explosion brought on by the pandemic1, particularly as a cost-controlling measure for youth items, which do not see enough checkouts for how much it costs to purchase them. If I'm not misremembering what the Prince or someone else said, if an item licensed through hoopla circs even once, that's a success. Which, given kids' regulated access to digital technology that, when finally unrestrained, immediately overshadows reading with social media and freemium gaming, completely tracks.
Once that was over, the task that was meant to be the actual change of plans provided some closure for a minor (to me) mystery at work. This mystery affected my branch the least, so I don't have all the facts of what happened, but around April or May, some of the largest branches in the system began to find movie disc cases left/put in the wrong places—and upon opening them up, their discs completely missing.
As it turns out, a coordinated group of folks had been going around the system and stealing DVDs, moving between branches and putting them in haphazard places to throw would-be pursuers off. The perpetrators did end up getting caught, but by then all the DVDs had been sold, leaving a bunch of cases that had incomplete disc sets if they weren't completely empty.2 Those cases had been gathered up and presumably languishing in the Collection Services office all this time, and since a shelfful of donated DVDs had been sitting around as well, I was tasked with figuring out what titles should stay and what should remain gone.
I've heard a lot of people think DVDs are outdated thanks to streaming services, and while DVD circulation has been trending lower and lower over the years, this is only true if you only mingle with and/or work at a branch with a community that has the means to afford streaming services. Which is very much not the case at my branch, as there are about a dozen or more patrons that I know who only check out movies because they can't afford or otherwise can't regularly access any other audiovisual medium. I imagine this is the same at any system with even a rural fringe within its service area—and it's not like streaming services have been particularly good stewards in keeping the collection of titles one paid for access to available with any longevity, either (Horowitz-Ghazi, 2023; Schonfeld, 2024).
Anyway, this was almost identical to the juvie donation evaluation from a few weeks ago; and since plenty of items, whether donated or empty, still had records in the system, it was a bit easier. Once what few donations that could directly replace a stolen disc were matched, every other had to be evaluated for if it would be missed or not by seeing if most of the other copies had been checked out in the last year. If so, then I would see if there was a real need to buy another copy—anything that had 3 or more would probably be okay, but those with 2 or just 1 would need a couple more copies purchased in case they got an uptick in interest.
For the most part, it seems as if everyone is resigned to the downtrend in DVD demand—one of the two buffer machines for fixing scratched discs broke recently, and there's no plan to purchase another if the last one breaks. I'm far from being even a marginal movie liker—literally the last movie I watched was Across the Spider-Verse in theaters more than a year ago, and I the plastic cases discs are kept in are seemingly as fragile as eggshells. But, given the promises of convenience and archival ability and longevity collectively attributed to the internet have been cannibalized by its most powerful forces (Bennett, 2024), it feels like letting DVD collection gradually lapse is a failure of a kind, even if public libraries are supposed to follow trends the most closely. Adding new copies of an old movie to a collection, even if its shelf life is inevitably finite, is probably a success in that regard, then.
Friday posed a return to the selecting board, but with a much more inflated scope, as I was given a firsthand look into the burdensome loads of adult collection development, provided by CRRL's adult selector, CDM. It probably isn't much of an exaggeration to say that adult collections librarians have more on their plate than their youth counterparts—old folk with enough of time on their hands to read a novel every single day are the de facto breadwinners of public libraries, and even the most voracious of children can't get library books without their parent or guardian, after all. The Prince has demonstrated many a bewilderment whenever we catch a glimpse of CDM's alongside his through purchase ratios or SAP requests or unit numbers, because the amount of different titles vying for their attention are often double or triple that of youth items. Sounds overwhelming, but adult materials obviously have like, a quarter of the red tape around what content is or isn't suitable, which is a plus in my book.3
Of course, CDM had no grumbles about her lot, though I don't think I ever made any gestures towards this. Since adults presumably have the comprehension to know what they're getting into when they open up a book (presumably), there's noticeably less industry reviews or selection aids or things vouching for a new release's quality. A few of the titles we came across, mostly cookbooks or other kinds of nonfiction, had her simply going "oh yeah these books are always here with no reviews, we just buy those anyway," or "adults don't really read atlases, so you can skip that one" (fools!!) There's also the fact that no small number of novels are from authors whose books basically print money, even if they're long dead—not much need for guidance when you know fifty patrons are gonna read it regardless of the book's actual quality.
Acquiring adult books would pretty much have the exact same calculations as youth items, if adult hardcover bestsellers didn't have hold lists so dang long for how so dang expensive they are. The number of books patrons go through is wildly disproportionate to how many copies would be needed after all the fanfare has died down in a year or two; so much so that one long-running vendor, Brodart, offers a service for libraries to lease out popular hardcovers. I have no idea how this ever provided a lot of benefit, given that these books can still get too damaged within however long a rental period is for surprisingly often, but just about any system with the population of CRRL's or larger relies on these rentals heavily. For example, Bonnie Garmus's Lessons in Chemistry, published in 2022, only passes through my hands at work maybe once or twice a month at this point, and out of the 27 copies in the system, 17 were acquired from Brodart.
CDM didn't go too much into specifics about terms, as apparently the cost of renting a bunch of books has started to outweigh the ROI more and more, to the point that it's better for CRRL's coffers to buy and own the books outright. The Life Impossible by Matt Haig, published four weeks ago on September 3, has a half/half Ingram purchased/Brodart rented split, supposedly because the need is manageable (if you can call the 77 holds it has at the time of writing manageable), but other titles clearly have demand that will exceed ownership for a while—Kristin Hannah's The Women, title du jour since its release in February, is all Brodart for all 49 copies.
Regardless of personal relativity, the adult workload is big enough that CDM tries to have her release carts made a whole three months in advance. I was promptly tossed into what should have been a deep end by getting to do the first couple weeks of December's calendar—except the dozens of releases on a given Tuesday tapers off to just a dozen at the peak of holiday season, which ends up being most of the selecting for the month. Still took most of the day, and just as mentally draining, but I've gotten a good enough grip of moving around Horizon and vendor platforms to get into a workflow that actually flows. By the time I had finished drafting this journal, CDM had pinged that the cart was ready thanks to my efforts—so I guess I definitely do have some talent for this selection thing after all.4
1 ^An offhand comment by the Captain at this meeting puts CRRL's material budget at approximately 57% digital, I think?
2 ^Not gonna lie, I feel like this is downhill from the same kind of commodifying grindset that has people descending on used booksales to buy piles of books just to resell them online, if extremely far down that hill. Nonetheless—stealing from the library, of all places? What the **** is wrong with people???
3 ^I might sound like I want to select for adults here, but I actually feel like I'll find each age group annoying to personally vouch for, at least for prose fiction. The curse of knowledge makes it difficult to enjoy juvenile books more complex than a picture book, every new YA release I've tried in the past few years features what feels like undirected, unnecessary melodrama (which is exactly what being a teenager is like, but still), and a lot of the adult novels that move the most copies seem rather shallow at best (which, again, is exactly the point and exactly why they're popular). Indeed, I am quite pretentious—but I also call that "wanting the (most of) art I enjoy to be good and earnest and honest about the world it was created and consumed in." God forbid I end up having to do lot of reader's advisory.
4 ^It helps if you have a semi-photographic memory that can estimate how often you see an author name, individually coupled with the kinds of books they write and the general vibe their covers tend to have. I think all the real estate in my brain that had been previously occupied by an encyclopedic knowledge of Pokémon and other video game factoids (Than, 2023) began emptying out once I began ignoring the mainstream games industry, only to fill up with book covers and author names and the like when I started working in libraries.
References
Bennett, G. (2024, March 14). Heat death of the internet. Takahē. https://www.takahe.org.nz/heat-death-of-the-internet/
Horowitz-Ghazi, A. (2023, March 17). Dozens of TV shows are disappearing from streaming platforms like HBO Max. Here’s why. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/17/1164146728/why-are-dozens-of-tv-shows-disappearing-from-streaming-platforms-like-hbo-max
Schonfeld, Z. (2024, October 1). Beware Hollywood’s digital demolition: It’s as if your favourite films and TV shows never existed. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/01/hollywood-digital-demolition-films-tv-shows-wiped
Than, K. (2023, October 23). Stanford researchers identify brain region activated by Pokémon characters [Stanford University]. Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/stanford-researchers-identify-brain-region-activated-pok-mon-characters