Managing the Holiday eBook Rush!

Here’s a heads up from Sara Gold and the Selection Committee.  If you have questions, please let them know!!

We anticipate this holiday season will trump last year’s in terms of demand on the WPLC collection, and we’ve heard from patrons — and from many of you — that they are expecting immediate access to popular materials.

The Selection Committee and WiLS want to make sure patrons have books to read on their shiny new devices from Santa.  So, here’s a quick update on what’s being done and how you can help:

  • The Selection Committee has ordered 2733 copies of ebooks in the past week, bringing the total number of ebooks in the collection to 18,132. The total number of titles including audio is 29,700.
  • We have designated 20 e-book titles (12 fiction and 8 nonfiction) as high demand titles and have ordered enough copies of each to eliminate or dramatically reduce the existing holds on each title.   The list of titles is attached.
  • For these 20 titles, we have pending orders set up for 3 days, December 24-26, and will be adding copies as needed to keep holds as low as possible.

For those of you with Advantage accounts:   To help with this effort, we strongly encourage you to add copies now, if you have the funds to do so.

Attached is the list of high demand titles to assist you in the process.  The titles are typically available within an hour of placing an order.  For more tips on managing the holiday rush and letting your patrons know what you have, please see these tips from OverDrive.

Holiday Push Titles for WPLC 2011

Thanks much,
Sara  Gold
sgold@wils.wisc.edu