| 2024 HOOPLA Digital Library Service - 2023 |
Amount Funded: $10,000.00 |
| HOOPLA puts Stoughtons public library at its patrons fingertips. Anyone. Anywhere. Anytime. It offers more content, in more places than any other digital library platform. The HOOPLA collection is made up of over 500,00 items. If an item is in the HOOPLA collection, patrons will have instant access to it, no matter how many other people are using it. HOOPLA provides library patrons in the Stoughton area community with instant access to a wealth of information at school, at home, at work to anyone, anywhere, anytime.
The FOL will assist the library in developing informational materials such as posters and bookmarks to explain HOOPLA and how to access it. |
| Since the pandemic, demand has steadily grown for remote, digital library services accessible anywhere, a trend already apparent prior to 2020. The pandemic lockdown accelerated the shift away from physical audiovisual materials (CDs and DVDs) in favor of streaming and downloadable content.
With these trends in mind, at the beginning of 2022, the Stoughton Public Library added Kanopy, a digital movie streaming platform. Since then, it has grown to become one of the librarys most-accessed digital resources. Kanopy, like HOOPLA, is a pay-per-use model in which the library pays each time patrons access the service, which makes budgeting challenging. The library launched Kanopy using gift funds and will be working its costs into the operating budget in the coming years, partially by reducing expenditures on physical audiovisual items.
HOOPLA is a pay-per-use platform offering audio books, e-books, music, magazines, television shows and some instructional classes for streaming and download. Because of its pay-per-use model, HOOPLA can offer library patrons, within the Stoughton (population, 13,085 in 2021) area community, simultaneous use of high-demand items. Libby, the librarys main provider of downloadable e-books, audio books and digital magazines, can only offer a limited number of digital "copies" of each title at a time, leading to long waiting lists for popular titles. HOOPLA is a popular service offered by libraries nationwide, including many within Stoughtons seven-county library consortium. The Stoughton Public Library had received many requests for this service from Stoughton-area patrons, but due to the cost and the vagaries of the pay-per-use model, the library had not been able to add the service until early 2023 when they received a grant from a local foundation. In the few short months that the library has been offering HOOPLA, it has quickly grown to become their most popular digital service. Unfortunately, due to the pay-per-use model, this means that costs have increased substantially. |
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