Librarian News

Yesterday we had a Digital Book eLending update webinar.  This was to refresh librarians on the various platforms and talk about any upcoming projects/news.  In this update, we added a bit more information for school librarians as more schools are going 1-1 with Chromebooks.

Archive
Presentation slides

News – for those of you already familiar with the platforms:

• TotalBoox – finally close to launch!  They have submitted a working copy of the iOS app to the Apple app store, so we hope to hear something soon.  Assuming we can launch, we will do a short webinar on them next month (previous webinar was in January, so it has been too long).
• Kansas Library eCard Stats – just a reminder that this project is in-process with all our ebook vendors.  Once complete, we’ll be able to show number of ebook circulations by library.  How this works – every library in Kansas has an account to login and create cards.  When you create a card, your library code is attached to that record.  This just wasn’t accessible by the ebook vendors until some additional work was done on the KSLC.  
• Kansas Self-Publish project – Brian Herder is still taking Librarian reviewers.  This is on Library Journal’s Self-E system, allowing Kansas authors to make their own ebooks.  The part allowing Kansas readers to view these books will not be set up by Library Journal until 30 books are accepted into the system.  Watch for announcement of a webinar on this in a few more weeks, and view the chart of “how this works.”
• Library Simplified – an open-source project that New York Public Library is building with LSTA/IMLS support, this will provide a discovery/reading layer over multiple platforms.  So, no matter how many ebook vendors a library has, the patron can use them all with just one app!  We’re following this project.  Lianne has had the chance to see the test versions of this app and it looks good!  This app is also the platform under the White House ebooks initiative.

Questions: audiobooks@library.ks.gov