Seattle’s Jim Loter Reveals His Library’s ReadersFirst Strategy

April 10, 2013

On Day Two of the “Imagine. Create. Innovate.” conference, Jim Loter, director of information technology at Seattle Public Library, discussed his library’s digital content strategy and the ReadersFirst movement.

While Douglas County (Colo.) Libraries, under the leadership of Jamie LaRue, has focused on independent publishers and self-published content, Seattle uses quite a number of mainstream e-content providers. SPL offers more than 117,000 ebooks through OverDrive, for example. Still, Loter isn’t totally pleased with the system. One major issue is that every vendor’s platform tends to replicate services already provided by the library’s ILS. OverDrive charges for a discovery platform, circulation system, and holds management that SPL’s ILS could handle.

Seattle Public Library is amassing library-produced content and making it available. Staff members record presentations held at the library and upload them as podcasts. SPL also offers an online menu of local history materials. The trick to ensuring that patrons find and use these resources, he said, is in cataloging all locally produced content into the main ILS; that facilitates discovery and averts platform fatigue for patrons. All images from ContentDM and the library blog are also cataloged, as is community content—for instance, a group of more than 4,000 songs recorded live at local independent radio station KEXP.

Loter then spoke about ReadersFirst, the movement to define rights for ebook readers in public libraries. ReadersFirst acknowledges the issue of library access, but is more focused on the problems surrounding discoverability. More than 250 libraries and systems have signed on, and your library can too: Just visit the website. There are two established goals of the ReadersFirst movement. The first is to advocate for the “same open, easy, and free access” to ebooks that libraries have with print. The second goal—though the first libraries are addressing—is the need to fix the fragmented and disjointed user experience for readers of digital library content. Too often, our content is broken into distributed silos with no easy way to search across all holdings, which is very confusing for patrons. In the end, the main push for ReadersFirst is the unbundling of content from platform. Resource providers like OverDrive and 3M should focus on securing content and then provide APIs to allow access through current library applications, he said.

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Seattle’s Jim Loter Reveals His Library’s ReadersFirst Strategy

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