I'm a huge fan of MontanaLibrary2Go. My husband and I use it all the time - I tend to get the eBooks, while he downloads audiobooks to his iPhone and listens to them on his commute. For patrons, it is really easy to set up and use, and I love that I can get digital content delivered wirelessly to my iPad. I think it is essential that we move in the direction of eBooks and eReaders if library is going to continue to meet the needs of its users. At my school, the library circulates both eBooks and Kindles. eBooks are both fiction and non-fiction, but at this point the main electronic acquisitions have been non-fiction based on the ease of updating information in the eBooks and the cost.
As per the lending Kindles, there are two collections: a special collection for AP and special needs, and a fiction collection. The special collection consists of class sets of kindles as the Pre-AP and AP English classes all have reading and research projects they conduct on the Kindles where the students learn to annotate and save using eReaders. These students will seek out and download the books they need, almost using the Kindle as a personal device. The library will also lend these Kindles to students who demonstrated a special need: a reading level that necessitates text-to-speech is the most common reason. The second collection of Kindles is the fiction collection: there are six Kindles organized by genre. The lending time is 3 weeks per Kindle, and each Kindle has a number of books in a certain genre (realistic fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, etc.). Students check out the Kindle, and read as many of the books as they can within the three week period.
In all, I think the Kindles by genre is the best way to approach the problem of a limited eBook collection. Ideally, however, our librarian would like to subscribe to Overdrive (the system used by MontanaLibrary2Go), and lend books to personal devices and library devices.
I am a huge fan of MontanaLibrary2Go now too. So glad that was part of this week's challenge.
ReplyDeleteWe have a local group talking about purchasing Kindles for the juniors and seniors. It was perfect timing as I feel a bit more articulate about them now. (I generally just snitched my kids' Kindles at volleyball games or basketball tourneys if I forgot to bring a book. I became a bit of a convert this week -- not a complete changeover, but I think I will buy one.)
My daughter hooked one of her non-reading friends on one of the series on her Kindle. It is exciting to see a kid who isn't a reader get hooked on a book, and I think the Kindle had a bit to do with it. She is able to look up words as she reads, and that has made an impact on her reading.
I like the Kindle by genre solution, and I think your library is using Kindles really well. Struggling readers could really benefit from the devices as do the AP students.
I think that it is great that the technology hooked a non-reader into reading! Being able to look up words and annotate right on the spot is essential for those low level readers. Interestingly, several of my students who went off to college planned to buy all of their text books as eBooks. Really, it is the wave of the future (though I don't believe that regular books will ever be completely gone!)
DeleteThanks for sharing your check-out system. It's really helpful to see what your school is trying. I think that ideally libraries would like to have their own subscriptions to Overdrive and select their own titles, but for most libraries, that's cost-prohibitive -- for now. OverDrive is a big company and the state of MT organized MtLib2Go as a state-wide subscription. Any library that wants to provide the content to their patrons can pay part of the fee. The fees are sliding and based on library population. So, it's branded with a reading cowboy and the word Montana, but it's a subscription from a big company and it's much cheaper to go in on the state subscription than to go it alone.
ReplyDeleteThat said, school librarians can work with their public libraries to have their students and parents use the public library for access to the subscriptions. School libraries don't have to subscribe themselves.
I know that it is the cost that keeps our librarian from buying into Overdrive. She has tried to collaborate with the librarians from other schools to by a district subscription, but 2 of the 4 librarians are just not interested. Too bad for the students.
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