[Michlib-l] Compiled responses to Hoopla question

Thu Jul 25 15:41:39 EDT 2019

Hi everyone!

As promised, here are the responses I received from my question about Hoopla usage. Thanks again to everyone who responded!

Best,

Alexis Tharp
pronouns: she/her/hers

Reference Librarian
William P. Faust Public Library of Westland
www.westlandlibrary.org
734-326-6123

Hi everyone,

We're looking to increase our Hoopla usage, as well as adjust our checkout settings and budget caps to meet demand. If your library uses Hoopla, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could answer the following questions:

1.       What is your monthly checkout limit per patron on Hoopla?

2.       Do you limit available items by price? For example, excluding items from the catalog that cost more than $3.99 per checkout, etc.

3.       How do you typically handle increased demand for Hoopla? For example, from time to time we've had to increase the month's Hoopla budget in response to patrons hitting the daily spending limit, a problem that tends to snowball once it starts.

Thanks in advance for any feedback! Please reply off-list; I'll be happy to compile responses for the group if anyone's interested.

Best,

Alexis Tharp

pronouns: she/her/hers

Reference Librarian

William P. Faust Public Library of Westland

www.westlandlibrary.org<https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=www.westlandlibrary.org&data=02%7C01%7Cjonesville%40monroe.lib.mi.us%7C1f04538d4b6642e56d5108d70ba4e59b%7C526ff4e31ba7453c9fb17562147081dd%7C0%7C0%7C636990675165745339&sdata=5alBWtqWAbO5vWmCPxorQtVAJINIbxixB%2FkvxUNrY0s%3D&reserved=0>

734-326-6123

Alexis,

We just started with Hoopla a few weeks ago, so my input won't be as valuable to you as others, but I figured it couldn't hurt to chime in.

1. We limit to 3 per patron.  This may increase, of course, if the budget allows for it, but right now it's a good, safe number.
2. We do limit by price, nothing costing more than $2 is visible to patrons.  That doesn't cut out much in most categories, the biggest pinch is in audiobooks (40% unavailable).
3. Obviously we don't have any issues with too much demand yet, so not sure how we'll deal with that, if needed.

Donald Priest
Director
Southgate Veterans Memorial Library
14680 Dix-Toledo Rd.
Southgate MI 48195
734-258-3002

Alexis;

Jonesville District Library has had Hoopla for about 2 years.  We limit patrons to 6 items per month and the maximum for items is around $4.00.  The previous director set us up with Hoopla.  Unfortunately, she did not make sure my library board understood how Hoopla works (cost per item).  We are a mid-size Class II library, serving around 5000 people.  My board set our budget up at $1500 per year, but that will not last until the end of our fiscal year (Jan-Dec.).  We are getting ready to either drop the monthly limits to 4 or 5 or lower the per item maximum cost (or possibly both).

Hope this info helps.
-Laura Orlowski, director
Jonesville District Library

1. Our limit is 5, we started at 3
2. We haven't set any limits on price or publisher, but maybe some day that would be an option
3. We don't have a daily spending limit, we set an annual budget based on average monthly expenditures leaving room for projected growth.

If you haven't already, you may want to have Hoopla conduct an analysis for you on your usage. We had made a lot of assumptions on how people were using Hoopla and there were some surprises in the stats, which helped us to make some decisions.

Jenny Marr
Director
Ferndale Area District Library
(Library) 248-546-2504
(Office)  248-547-6000
www.ferndalepubliclibrary.org<http://www.ferndalepubliclibrary.org>

1.       What is your monthly checkout limit per patron on Hoopla?
Four checkouts. Used to be five, but I'm trying to keep the cost under control.

2.       Do you limit available items by price? For example, excluding items from the catalog that cost more than $3.99 per checkout, etc.
"The maximum allowed borrow price for audiobooks titles is $3.99.
0 titles are blocked by the budget settings."

3.       How do you typically handle increased demand for Hoopla? For example, from time to time we've had to increase the month's Hoopla budget in response to patrons hitting the daily spending limit, a problem that tends to snowball once it starts.
We haven't had many patron complaints, but if we do get one, we say, sorry, the limit is four titles per month. You'll have to wait until next month to check out four more.  We have no "spending limit", daily or otherwise. Just the four titles per month limit.

Jean Hansen
Head of Adult and Outreach Services
Waterford Township
Public Library
5168 Civic Center Dr
Waterford MI 48329
p. 248.618.7682

jhansen at waterfordmi.gov<mailto:jhansen at waterfordmi.gov>
www.waterfordmi.gov/Library<http://www.waterfordmi.gov/Library>
https://www.facebook.com/WaterfordLibrary

Hi Alexis,

Hoopla is SUPER popular at CPL. We've had it since 2013, so it's had some time to grow, for sure, and now it's almost as big as OverDrive for our users. We have a 20-item checkout limit, but our average user still checks out ~5 each month. When we started, we had about 1500 checkouts per month, and now it's steadily over 5K. Whenever MWT starts growing a part of Hoopla's offerings, we see a surge in use and have to adjust things budget or price caps. This has been manageable mostly because we over-funded it in its first years, and dumped unspent database money there one budget year, so we had a nest egg to rely on when they tripled their audiobook offerings in 2015/2016. In recent years we've been moving funds from some print collections to electronic resources (Board request), because print circ is dropping and ebook use is growing. We're seeing another surge for Hoopla as their ebook and comic offerings improve as well.

To manage costs, we've limited by price. We have the following caps:
Audiobooks - $3.49
eBooks - $3.29
TV - $1.99
movies, comics and music aren't capped right now.

We don't budget by month or day. We try to avoid having patrons run up against those kind of hard caps if we can avoid it, so they don't feel they need to compete with other people for a limited resource (costing us more money in wasted circs). We've done a little bit of behind-the-scenes controls, blocking items that are pricey, popular, and redundant (already paid for in OverDrive), or just so bad we'd weed them from our own shelves (ex. business books that are aimed at Canadian women in the 90s, "current events" audio from the 80s). We haven't had much time to do that this year, but I think it has helped. Still, (mostly due to the price caps), we've had luck getting bang for our buck: average checkout cost in June was $1.71.

We've been fortunate to have the funds to keep up with this growth, but we've had some discussions about what our plan B is for when we can't keep up with growth. Right now our first plan would be to lower some of the price caps, since that's an "invisible" control, and we can more easily let up on that if it becomes affordable once more. If that didn't do the trick, the next step would be to decrease the checkout limit to 12, which is still reasonable IMO, but would take some careful communication and would be more noticeable for patrons. 80% of patrons borrow 8 or fewer items each month.

Let me know if you have any other questions. Good luck and godspeed, and all that.

-Megan

Hi, Alexis--

Hoopla is very well used in our community.  We met recently with our Midwest rep and received an annual review of usage with some helpful statistics.  In response to your questions...
1. We allow 10 checkouts per month per patron.  (Previously we allowed 12, but when we added Kanopy, we lowered the hoopla limit to match Kanopy hoping to avoid confusion.)
2. We do not limit available items by price.  I may be mistaken, but I think hoopla now limits their items to $3.99 or less.  Our stats show that nearly half of our circulations are in the $1.00-$1.99 level.
3. We do not have any daily spending limits.  Over the past couple of years, our monthly invoices increased quite a bit, but they seem to have (mostly) leveled off now.  The cost is still high, but we feel that we get good value for the price.
Our previous Midwest rep gave us some good advice about adding a message to our website that may be useful.  Here's what we use:
Hoopla and Kanopy are on-demand services, which means there are never any waitlists or holds for items. This is a great feature, for which the library is charged each time a title is checked out. Please help us continue to offer these amazing services by limiting your checkouts to items you feel you will be able to use during the allotted time period.

Hope this helps!
Mary Ellen

Mary Ellen Mulcrone
Director
Saline District Library
555 N. Maple Road
Saline, MI   48176
734-401-1283
www.salinelibrary.org<http://www.salinelibrary.org>

Alexis,
Answers for Garden City:

  1.  We currently limit patrons to 4 hoopla checkouts per month.
  2.  No.  We provide patrons the complete hoopla catalog.
  3.  At first we allowed patrons up to 8 checkouts per month.  Then we lowered it to 6.  Finally we had to lower it to 4.  If we need to make further adjustments, we will likely put a monthly cap on our monthly hoopla budget.
Hope this helps,
    James

Hi Alexis,

1.       What is your monthly checkout limit per patron on Hoopla?

We got Hoopla in January of 2018.  We started out with 3 checkouts per patron and increased it to 5 after monitoring the cost for 4 months.

2.       Do you limit available items by price? For example, excluding items from the catalog that cost more than $3.99 per checkout, etc.

No

3.       How do you typically handle increased demand for Hoopla? For example, from time to time we've had to increase the month's Hoopla budget in response to patrons hitting the daily spending limit, a problem that tends to snowball once it starts.

We haven't found that to be a problem.  How many checkout do you allow your patrons?  I know our patrons would love more than 5 per month, but we are sticking with 5 for the time being.

Toni

Hi Alexis,

1.           What is your monthly checkout limit per patron on Hoopla? Our monthly checkout limit is 5 per patron. This was lowered from 9 last year. Previously we were also having issues with patrons hitting the cap and creating confusion and frustration for all involved. 5 checkouts is 1 more than what our average patron was checking out. This limit helps allows more patrons to use the service and we're not hitting our daily cap.

[cid:image001.png at 01D542FF.0B827390]

2.       Do you limit available items by price? For example, excluding items from the catalog that cost more than $3.99 per checkout, etc. Our maximum allowed borrow price is 3.99. Hoopla doesn't offer too many high dollar items any more. They're working harder to negotiate better prices now. I still like to offer those high dollar items though because I like our patrons to have simultaneous use of popular materials. That's a big part of Hoopla's appeal.

3.       How do you typically handle increased demand for Hoopla? For example, from time to time we've had to increase the month's Hoopla budget in response to patrons hitting the daily spending limit, a problem that tends to snowball once it starts. I think with Hoopla, and similar services, it's about managing patron expectations. This is challenging. Patrons don't realize how much each checkout costs their library. We sent an email out to our Hoopla users before the change was made, and gave our staff talking points to share with patrons who may have had issues (if you're interested in email wording let me know, and I'll see if I can hunt this up.). This was our talking point blurb for staff to pass along to patrons:

*                     As Hoopla popularity and usage continues to grow, we aim to have fewer turnaways or "daily cap blocks." We are making this change to manage our budget, allowing more people to use the service and for regular users to have a better experience while using hoopla. Thank you for your feedback as we continue to evaluate the product.

We also gave staff this background information:
*                     The borrow limit in Hoopla will be set at 5 borrows per month per user as of October 1. The current limit is 9.
*                     We are making the change to allow more people to use the service and have a better experience with the product while they are there.
*                     Currently patrons using Hoopla have been experiencing daily budget cap blocks earlier and earlier in the day due to increased usage. They are being turned away when they attempt to borrow at peak times.
o        As a reminder, daily limits are reset at midnight for the following day if you are helping patrons use hoopla.
*                     750 users check out more than 5 items per month out of 2,600.
*                     Although KDL spending on Hoopla was increased by 51% in 2018 over 2017, this is not enough to keep up with demand. Currently $20,000 per month is spent in Hoopla. The average cost of a "borrow" in Hoopla is around $2.00.
*                     Spending and limits will be revisited in the future as demand will likely continue to increase.  While we will try and increase the budget to maintain the 5 title check out limit, further limits may need to also happen to help manage costs.
*                     KDL has also requested Hoopla change the "Daily Cap" error message to make it clear the "Daily Cap" is related to spending. Right now the message is confusing to patrons and staff.

Please let me know if this helps and if you have further questions.

Best Regards,

Ali

Alison Kuchta
Collection Development Librarian
Kent District Library
814 West River Center Dr. NE * Comstock Park, MI 49321
616-784-2016, ext. 2179 * akuchta at kdl.org<mailto:akuchta at kdl.org>

Hi Alexis,

Our Hoopla usage is going through the roof, too. We ended up lowering our monthly checkout to 6 items this spring (it had been lowered to 8 two or so years ago). We do not limit items by price since the most popular items tend to be the higher priced ones and we'd get a lot of pushback from high-usage patrons re: that restriction (it tends to be audiobooks that drive these increases for us). The increased demand has forced us to take money from book budgets, unfortunately, and will likely continue to in the near future.

Please compile and share back. I'd love to hear what others are doing. Cheers,

Andy Schuck
Youth Services Coordinator
Traverse Area District Library
610 Woodmere Ave
Traverse City, MI 49686
231-932-8500, x260
www.tadl.org<http://www.tadl.org>

We do limit our checkouts to 4 per month. We also limit by price - I believe ours is $4.99 and under. We budget daily for Hoopla. We have a certain amount of money we can spend each year and that's what we give it. We are monitoring it very carefully. I'm not sure if there is ever a sweet spot of money to checkouts - so patrons don't get locked out of checking out. Seems like we could spend spend spend and it would never be enough. We pretty much max our budget every month. I have not found a good solution to this. I would love to hear your other responses.

Thanks -
Val Meyerson
Petoskey District Library

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