A Digital Shopping List

It’s not an easy thing, a bit like going supermarket shopping for someone you haven’t met and only being able to use their old receipts to make a list. You must consider what did not feature on the receipts as much as what they bought a lot of.

The first step for us was to identify which platforms our people couldn’t do without – the Weetbix™ of the digital resources if you like. Take these off the shelf and you’d have open rebellion..

When we consulted the numbers these ones were easy to spot. For example, our borrowers had watched a whopping 23,540 movies on our streaming service Beamafilm between May’22 and April ’23 and read a stunning 146,018 magazine and newspaper articles on PressReader. Our eAudio and eBook platform Borrowbox had over 111,446 issues in that same period, and we helped people with over 20,000 Ancestry searches. Phew. And the best part was that it was all accessed freely with a Dunedin Public Library membership.

Our next step was to then identify which platforms were not getting enough use to justify keeping. A cost per use analysis led to a tough decision not to renew World Book Online, Story BoxLibrary and Generosity. Instead, we will be providing all new access to the impressive interactive online version of a highly regarded encyclopaedia Britannica Online as well as the New Zealand History and The Treaty of Waitangi collections from Bridget Williams Books. These will be hugely valuable resources for students studying the new Aotearoa History curriculum and for anyone seeking reliable, high-quality information. This is our whole foods shopping, to help with a balanced diet…

Another very difficult decision was then made to discontinue the Wheelers ePlatform, which was costing significantly more per use for eBooks than Borrowbox. By doing this we hope to make our budget go further and this will be a good thing for all users of our eContent. Understandably, the decision to move away from the Wheelers may be disappointing for some. To help, we will be offering to support anyone who would like assistance with setting up the Borrowbox app, via our Book a Librarian service. Please keep an eye on our website for updates. This change is scheduled for late August.

One final announcement, the pièce de résistance really, is that these changes have allowed us some wiggle room to fund another new and addictive platform: Creativebug. Arts and craft have always been popular here in creative Dunedin so we think this one will do very well - hopefully it will quickly become the Whittaker’s™ of the libraries list – the sweet treat at the end. We look forward to telling you more about it but if you can’t wait feel free to take a peek now.