Some – temporarily – sad news for fans of the Downtown SLO City/County Library, most of the building closed to visitors on Oct. 1.
No surprises. Back in August, shortly after the announcement of the library administration’s plans, a reporter from the SLO City News checked over the space on the third story that they plan to make open to the public, and the assistant director of libraries Chase McMunn still promises all three floors will be open to the public, with the first floor featuring new automation, in January 2017.
Some good news for the here and now however, while the main branch’s 93,000 items in collection are being boxed and sorted for a new shelving scheme, the system’s fourth largest branch just got some major expansion. That’s made possible by the SLO County Library being a member of the Black Gold Library Cooperative, which operates a virtual collection.
The Black Gold made some 182,914 “digital checkouts,” possible last year through their subscription to three major electronic viewing services.
The “fourth largest branch” name comes from the fact that 182,914-circulation number places them as the fourth most trafficked branch in the entire system if it were a physical location.
The system’s flirtation with digital downloads started right at the cusp of the smartphone and podcasting revolution in 2006 when they bought the rights to the Overdrive system, which allows access to ebooks and “books on tape” through digital downloads. As one of the first on the market, Overdrive was little clunky, at least on Android phones, but the concept took off.
In 2014 Black Gold invested in subscriptions to the Zinio and Enki services, which offer more specialized databases.
Just in time for Downtown SLO location remodel, the library bought into the most widely known system, Hoopla, which bills itself as a “Netflix”-like application allowing streaming of audio and access to a catalog of half a million movie and book titles. Or as the company phrased it in announcing their local roll out, “500,000 movies, music, eBooks and more.”
Movie watching is similar to any streaming service, but the “and more” is an understatement of the platform’s versatility.
As with all of the library’s subscriptions, the only thing patrons need to log in is their Black Gold Library System card, with that online and mobile or access on tablets and smartphones is all the cardholder needs.
Unfortunately, only 10 items can be “checked out” per month but the library includes graphic novels or audio productions that are otherwise quite rare in the physical realm. On tablets, especially with the item downloaded for offline perusal, the system is a marked difference for anyone who remembers waiting in a hold queue for weeks only to find that the precious single copy of a long awaited work had been lost on someone else’s vacation.
In all, the digital content expansions are part of the SLO Library’s recent direction shift incorporate ever more experience based learning into their programs.
In fact the digital frontier is the easy part.
Earlier this year the system partnered with the local SLO MakerSpace, to allow members access to the classes and equipment at the shop. While the fees to join the MakerSpace are nominal compared to owning one’s own equipment, founding member Clint Slaughter recently told an industry gathering that he’d seen the library card project days open a the space to a whole world of creative folks who couldn’t afford the regular entry.
“We can see what’s working well for our patrons,” said Chase. “Our push really comes down to getting items in the hands of people that need or want them. Its actually embracing ‘Learn by Doing,’ which I guess is a Cal Poly thing..”
But, he added, “We do wok with them too.”
